 Okay, maybe I can start. Yes, I see we just went to 35. That was a quick minute. So yes, good morning, everyone. Welcome to this either workshop on the Digital Education Hub. My name is Leonie Bulding. I am a policy assistant in the Digital Education Unit and the Director General of Education and Culture and Innovation and Youth in the European Commission. I'm here joined by my colleague Anushka Ferrari. Today we're going to talk a little bit about the objectives of the goals of the hub, which is a flagship initiative of the Digital Education Action Plan. This series or this sort of workshop kind of fits in a series of stakeholder consultations we've been doing on the hub since March. The goal of which is to talk to as many stakeholders and interested parties to feed into the conceptualization of this hub. The main objectives really fit well, let's say in our goals for this session that we will be having today because the hub basically let's say its overall goal is to create this, to reinforce cooperation and dialogue between different stakeholders in the area of digital education because as we all know, digital education, the ecosystem of digital education is quite a broad one and involves many, many different actors across many different sectors. So the aim here is to create this space where we can exchange best practices and bring different parties together that work on digital education. And we can see this sort of reflected in our event today and our speakers that are here with us today that we will introduce later on. So what we mean with cross sectorial basically means that we will sort of break the silos between educational and training sectors but also between different stakeholders. This means coming from private sector, practitioners, researchers, as well as schools and educators and learners or local and regional governments and bringing all those sort of interested stakeholders together. And as we will see in the second, further part of this event is that our speakers here today really represent, first of all, the research side with Romina Cochia and then we have Kristal Rillo who is more representative of the government side of the public authority with her experience within the Ministry of Education. And finally, we will be having presentations of Donatella Solda and Damian Lanfri who are more on the private side, so represent ATEC. I will now give the floor, before I do that, sorry, I would like to remind us of the sort of digital etiquette, so please mute your mics unless you are speaking and feel free to use the chat to ask us questions, to introduce yourselves. We are very excited about this today, this event and we hope we can, we can spark some interesting conversations. And I will now hand the floor, so to my colleague Anushka who will talk a bit more on the timeline of this digital education hub and the implementation of it. So Anushka, the floor is yours. Thank you, thank you, Leni. And thanks to the speakers that are participating today. The last probably administrative or technical part to be shared is that parts of this conversation today are going to be live streamed and recorded. So when we are going to be split up in breakout rooms, this will not be the case necessarily. At least not in the first breakout room. So we have people participating here in the workshop, but we also have people that are seeing this on YouTube and that will be see the recording of this session. So as Leni was saying, our aim is to consider how the objectives of the hub fit into the current agenda on digital education in Europe. So I will give you a very, very short timeline and overview of the initiative, this initiative that is led by the European Commission and how it fits into today's workshop. And now we hope we can cooperate with all of you in the future. So this initiative sets and is part of the digital education action plan 2021, 2027. So we came out with this communication last September and this is actually the second digital education action plan that the commission proposes. We proposed the first one, a first digital education action plan in 2018, but that was more limited in scope. So yeah, the remit of two years and it was covering just formal education, so primary, secondary and higher education. When the new commission took office, that was December 2019, there was a lot of interest on digital education. And actually in the guidelines, in the political guidelines of President von der Leyen, there was already, so this interest was already quite well expressed and spelled out. And actually the president gave to our commissioner, Commissioner Gabriel, the mandate to update the digital education action plan. With this mandate to update the digital education action plan, we started working on a new version of it, let's say there would be more ambition and cover adults, for instance, and cover all sectors of education and training, but would also be more ambitious in terms of timeline, so going up, not just for two years, but going up to for the full financing period, and also more ambition in terms of outputs. Now, this happened at the beginning of last year, beginning of 2020, which was in a way a very different setup than what we have now. And then when we were starting working on the update of the digital education action plan, the pandemic started and we moved to distance education. So of course, the actions and activities that we thought of proposing with this new digital education action plan took another form and another meaning. And I think that this shaped as well part of the activities that we proposed during 2020 for the preparation of the new digital education action plan with its several stakeholders consultation. We did an open public consultation and actually this action, the digital education hub, came as a response to this consultation. So it was basically stakeholders that proposed to have a sort of space that would give them the mean to cooperate, the means for peer learning, the means for sharing experiences. So we took these ideas that came from different stakeholders and tried to modify it and proposed something that we think would benefit the uptake of digital education in Europe. And we think that basically there is a need now to keep the momentum going. So we all experience distance education in different ways according to our personal circumstances and according to the circumstances of the organization we work in according to the learning we engage with. And today we would like to hear from our participants. On the one hand, the reflection on how we can learn from this experience on distance education and the experience of the pandemic and then would be in particular for Romina to tackle. But also how in general terms we can move towards the digital transformation for recovery and that would be more the role of Christelle. As Leonid was saying in introductory remarks, what the hub is aiming to do is to bring together different stakeholders that work in education. So researchers, policymakers, the public sector, the private sector. And we have here today with us Damian and Donatella, we're going to tell us how they see the attic market and how they see the cooperation between public and private sector. So I think we can already move in the first session of breakout rooms. In this session, this session of breakout rooms is not going to be live streamed nor recorded. So we will have just a few minutes, just four minutes actually, where we will be in this breakout session with another person. So it'll just be for us a way of introducing to each other to talk to somebody who is here in this session with us and to share our opinion on the impact of the pandemic on education and training. So what do we think that this pandemic meant for education and training? Is this a turning point for digital education or not? So, Robert, if you could please move us all in the breakout rooms, that would be nice. Thank you. Okay, I think we're all here. All right. I hope everyone had an interesting talk in the breakout room. For me, that was definitely the case. This was just a bit of an icebreaker, to just open the conversation, get to know each other a little bit. And now it's time to go to our first presenter, to our first speaker. This is Romina Cotchia. She's a researcher with the Joint Research Center from the European Commission. Romina has ample experience with research projects on digital education and different digital education projects funded by the Commission. Among those are Selfie, which is quite a famous one. This is a self-assessment tool, a self-assessment tool for schools to assess the way they go about using digital tools in their schools and how they can do it more effectively. She will present to us two very recent, recently, or sort of the preliminary results, sorry, from two studies that GRC has published on the impact of COVID on education and training. So Romina, if you're ready, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Leonie and Anushka. So I will share my screen. Okay, so I will speak about two main studies that are not yet published. One of them should be published by the end of this month and another one will be published in autumn related to lessons that we are learning from the pandemic for the future of education. So these are the two studies that I will be talking about. One of them, the one on the left, is a study that was carried out part of the Kitticoate study. This is a big study and this is one of the reports and this report is specializing on qualitative data that we have done with families in 10 countries and it is interviews with families and their children and what they have experienced, how they have experienced education during the COVID-19 lockdown. And then the second study I will be talking about is the study that is currently in progress. So we have done this with five countries and this is a study that has been done about what happened during the 2020-2021 year, so this cholestic year that is ending now and what we have learned from it. Just to say that the second study we have just received the country reports from five countries and we are still working on the cross-country reports. So the country reports just came in last week so it's very preliminary results that I will be giving today. So from the first report, I can say that we have learned from the families that a wide range of learning took place during the COVID-19 lockdown and video has become the new teacher. So many students found themselves that they could not ask the teacher or they did not have any kind of virtual connection with the teacher and many students and even parents suggested that they look for a video. So video took a new role, apart from creating videos and sharing them, they were also looking for information and this gave a new autonomy to the students that the students were very proud about and that the parents as well spoke quite proudly that the children could learn on their own. It's kind of a realization for the parents, no? And we have also found that remote schooling varied greatly, so it varied in the platforms that were used, some schooling was done through video conferencing software, others was done through learning platforms, other was done through instant messaging with the mobile of the parents and the parents acting as intermediaries. So it was really a big mix and match and there were schools who only used paper, other schools use a mix now of virtual and paper and other schools try to use only virtual environments but irrelevant of the differentiation that took place, we have seen that the majority of kids have improved their digital skills and they also spoke very proudly of their improvement of digital skills. Here I have to mention the role of the parents, parents felt very tired and that the role of parents of becoming instructors, especially for younger students because this was done with six to 12 years old children was really big and acting as intermediary was very cumbersome on them. We have found that the displacement of digital devices from leisure and entertainment to schooling really surprised how the children felt with these digital devices. So these are students, a cohort of students that are really engaged with technology in a very different way than we would imagine. So they were really happy to go to remote schooling and using technology and then all of a sudden they found themselves bored, unmotivated and they were really surprised with this change. And then they kind of realized that the technological affordances that were being used for remote schooling was really not matching their expectations. And at the same time we saw that children so while they said that they were bored during these long video conferencing there were some schools where they just transposed the whole schedule from nine to four for instance or nine to two online and children felt really this was very tiring for them. But at the same time they spoke really proudly of learning new skills of becoming really creative with digital devices for school projects to learn independently as I've already for socializing with friends. And there we saw that there should be a need for a better design of online and remote instruction for this cohort of students who are really in these kind of interaction with digital devices that are highly interactive and highly stimulating. So this is a quote from one of the parents from a French student and she said the first few weeks were very difficult. There was a lot of homework to do. There was a lot of homework to hand in more than in normal times. So it was very complicated. Sometimes there were three to four assignments to hand in during the same day. I even sent an email to the teacher asking them to slow down a bit on the homework because it wasn't possible. We're drowning in homework. So this is just an example of one parent who was feeling that her daughter was overwhelmed with the schoolwork. As we all know, and I kind of expected remote schooling did not favor all children equally. So some children really nurtured in this environment and other children really stayed behind because they were not perhaps able to access remote schooling because they had to do school house chores because of other reasons that the teachers, it was very difficult for them to engage these students who were kind of getting this engaged. And even in the families, so we found that the majority of families had double or triple the number of devices, digital devices than the number of members in the family. But not in all the families, the devices that they had were apt for remote schooling. Families who were resistant to digital devices felt they had to renounce their values on digital devices to ensure that their students did not fall behind. And some felt that remote schooling has even accelerated their children's use of digital device against their will. Despite the overall positive, so when we spoke about how do you feel about digital devices, children and parents felt they were really, they were very important in their lives. But when it came to remote schooling, both children and parents expressed mixed feelings. So there was a feeling of digital tiredness. Some children felt that they did not have enough contact with the teacher. And that's why, because of this mix and the match of different things that were happening, the parents always felt the grass is greener on the other side effect now because my children only did paper, so they should have virtual. And those who had virtual insisted that they buy a printer so that their children work on paper. So it was this mixed feeling of the operation and the effectiveness of schooling. And children really miss the social aspect of schooling and many parents were worried about the children's mental wellbeing. And the majority of children said they want to go back to face-to-face learning and to playing. I want to mention one family that comes to my mind. This daughter, she's a 10-year-old daughter who had a sibling who was three years old. So both parents had to work outside the house. So the daughter had to take care of the three-year-old as well. So she would wake up early to try to do her schoolwork. And then when the three-year-old daughter, the sister would wake up, she had to kind of help her to have her breakfast. And then she would miss some of the classes because she would be taking care of her sister. And then when she had to come into the classes, she would give a tablet to her three-year-old sister to be entertained while she is in class. So this is just to give you some of the realities that were faced with, you know. And larger families had especially problems to share the voices between having everybody engaged during the remote schooling encounters with teachers, for example. So from the second study, what we have learned from the 2020, 2021 for the new normality of education. So the national response has varied a lot. I will just mention some similarities. So all countries try to prepare for last summer, try to prepare for schooling to take place in person while also keeping in mind what happened in spring 2020 lockdown. Of course, some countries went into lockdown again. And a major change that we see is that many teachers really have argued for reduction of curriculum and this seems to be taking place, no? Because of the way that schooling has taken place during this past quality year. One of the main challenges for teachers was this hybrid learning model. They were unprepared in designing this teaching and also consider hybrid learning as doubling their workload. So one of the Romanian experts, for instance, explained to us that one of the teachers in one of the interviews, was telling her that she was doing a class with on-site children and online children. And she started speaking to the online children and almost forgot that she had the children there on site. And she felt that she has defeated her own students. So she felt really, really bad that she even for these few minutes, she almost ignored that she has a class in front of her attending her class. So they find it really difficult to be doing this dual role, no? This report in particular is looking as well in inclusion and what we are finding out that the issue of inclusion was really difficult to tackle. So in many countries, vulnerable students were offered the option to follow remote schooling. This did not always work as planned. So some people either dropped out completely and the children and the teachers had more difficulty to try to contact these children. And some of them even had to do some house chores or work-related chores that did not allow them to be in the remote schooling classes. And also there is the teachers are talking that now in this new remote schooling environment, sometimes it is difficult to predict who is a vulnerable student. So while before we had a kind of definition of who are the vulnerable students, now we are starting to get a new type of vulnerable student that before was not there, no? And students, when we ask them out, when the experts ask them about vulnerability, they talk about peers that had problems with mental health and well-being during this post-pandemic reality. And finally, in terms of hybrid learning after the lockdown, so teachers were often not so keen on this hybrid learning model, because as I said, it doubles their workload. And in some cases they failed, they are neglecting some students, either the classroom students or the online students. And in general, some teachers observed that the teaching has become more teacher-centered because it's more difficult, especially with the COVID measures that had to be taken into account on on-site schooling. So it's much more difficult to carry out collaborative or cooperative group work as well, project-based learning was now this year much less put into practice. And this was mostly replaced by frontal instruction. In some cases, we could sense that there is a sense of failure in the relation to blended learning and disillusionment of the potential of educational technology. And remote learning has demanded that there is a flexibility between structure and flexibility, the balance. So on the one hand, there has to be some structure for students and teachers, but it also demands that the teachers and the school has some autonomy to have some flexibility because the context varies so much in different schools, regions and countries, country level. So... Amina, sorry. Amina, one minute, please. That's it. That's it for my speech. So thank you very much for opportunity to share our results. So, Amina, I didn't want to interrupt you, but I'm very sorry about this. Thank you very much, Amina. We see that we also have a question in the chat, actually, about your presentation. Abba... Ooh, I'm not... Ops, yeah, news song. Sorry for butchering your name. Which countries were involved in the second study? So the second study were Estonia, Hungary, Romania, Spain and Denmark. Great. Thank you very much, Amina. Thank you very much for your very interesting presentation. I think we can see from the chats it rang a lot of truth to a lot of people's experiences, also of participants here present. Now we will move on to our second speaker, which is Christelle Rillo, who is an expert on growth and e-governance in general and also with a focus on e-education She also, Christelle, also has a lot of experience at the Ministry of Education of Estonia and she will talk a little bit about how Estonia became a model of digital transition. So, Christelle, if you're ready, the floor is yours. Yes, thank you and welcome everybody to this very interesting workshop. So I'm eager to see what JRC is discovering or revealing about Estonia in the second report. So thank you in advance for that. I've been always a huge fan of JRC's work because there are very nice reports and studies to take and adjust to local circumstances. So coming to that maybe later on as well. Yes, indeed, I've been in an education system in terms of digital transformation as well as innovation for seven years. Before that, I was involved in these different EU programs for preparing Estonia for EU. So making a difference is my DNA. But what is Estonia's DNA is that we are digital society. This also gives this kind of favorable platform for education, a clean environment. If you have visited Estonia, then we have a nice nature here. So we have to keep it clean and sustainable. Independent Mind is something that is definitely coming from education sector and education is valued highly by our people and government despite who is in power. And something maybe again, to know before I'm going further is that education only cannot make everything happen. Of course, we can grow this kind of digital-minded people and innovative mindsets. But if you have already the platform also from other sectors like economy, taxation system and so on, there are the other public sector services online and parents are using them and grandparents are using them and companies are using different services and building services. Then it's already easier for education to operate themselves as well and to have this mindset and focus on educational content and specialties mainly. So in Estonia, we have 99% of public services online. What you can't do digitally is get married or divorced and buy real estate because this is very closely involved by and sell real estate because this is very much connected to your wellbeing. And if you're somehow forced digitally to do that, then it might impact on your wellbeing. So this is the reason behind that. Why don't we have a 100%? Although 100% is not very, very, how to say strange for us is because we with our recent strategy in education set very ambitious targets. For example, we had a set down in 2013 that 100% of graduates from basic school which is our compulsory school should have a digital skills appropriate to their age. So 100% imagine education people, how it's possible to achieve something 100%. So what was very good about it is that the strategy was actually with shared objectives across all sectors, not only education stakeholders, but also other sectors, economy, social affairs and so on. And also of course private sector and third sector. So this kind of very straightforward and ambitious goals. We didn't actually know how to do that, but we knew that it must be done. So what also was the shift was that moving away from this kind of action planning or performance-based approach. Like you know the indicators for how many teachers have attended the training. So what they have participated at the training, what changes. So we set this kind of result oriented approach that we need to be there. We need to have the digital skills for these age groups. Let's figure out what kind of skills are needed, how can we deliver this and how can we measure those. And in here, for example, we took the JRC report on the digital competence framework, I just did it to our education system curricula and student age groups and just started to go on that. The last change we did that actually supported us during the COVID was that we very strongly introduced digital pedagogy into learning and teaching. So it was also designed into professional standards for teachers. So the universities also had to take this framework on board as well in their curricula. So this was this kind of systematic approach. Why I'm talking about this last strategy because now we are already on the way with the new but with COVID we got this kind of really strict feedback on whether the things we did were the right things. So, and the assessment was very good. So now this kind of document analysis or something like that, but we actually saw with our own eyes whether the services and something that we did were in the right place. The second thing that was in the strategy as a whole was that we were not mainly focusing on infrastructure whether there are sufficient number of computers in schools because we let it go. We let the schools decide what is needed, whether they needed the sensors, their laptops, the computers, what did they need? So it was up to them. We just provided the platform they could get the financial support from. So we left this autonomy with schools. Otherwise you can't force certain device to every one size doesn't fit all matter in terms of different disciplines. Of course the same infrastructure had to be in place in terms of connectivity. What we discovered during the COVID was that the connectivity within schools was good, but at home it got more difficult. We didn't, in education system, we didn't pay too much attention to what is happening at home. And if in Estonia, people are living not so much in the centers always and the connectivity for video lessons might be slightly poor in some places then it was a challenge. So what happened was there was even more, even better cooperation with social, Ministry of Social Affairs and local municipalities to identify where the homes are, where the children don't have access to internet. This is another thing that we have learned what is shaking our world here is that the word accessibility is somehow changed because in Estonia we have free transportation, it's free to go to school, to work, but actually at some point we were online, everybody were online and we have internet contracts and agreements and fees. So somehow working got, we had to work for money when we wanted to work from home. So this was this kind of mindset again. But again, sustainability in terms of infrastructure what I wanted to maybe point out here as well is that we had this whole set of, or the whole scope approach, infrastructure skills and methodology as well as services and content. And not the only textbooks or something like that but actually to take the administrative burden away from schools and let them focus on their expertise and this kind of content and teaching and learning. But it was interesting that we were, everybody probably knows about Selfie but we had our own assessment before Selfie got into picture was digital mural. And we had a majority of our compulsory schools going through this assessment voluntarily because we said that if you're doing that to assess the mural yourself and assess your digital maturity, you can apply for financial support to buy digital devices for your pleasing. And what was the outcome from the study of this research that our University of Thailand did was that we asked what was the two or three things that were common for this kind of front-run schools? And the two things were somehow unexpected because usually people think that a number of computers or something like that is the most by the thing. But the answer was that a good wifey and as school leader with a vision, everything else will be settled and sold but these are the two things that need to be there. Third pillar is the sustainable networks that we had built over the years with teachers unions, private public cooperation platforms that we indeed have with umbrella organizations for sustainable and continuous work, not project-based, but they are there. It was the case that before COVID, maybe there were not so many outstanding results or this kind of a-ha effects, but during the COVID, they were irreplaceable partners to settle with the challenges or to solve the challenges we confronted. And of course, leadership networks because the ones who felt the most left out were the school leaders because they were the ones everybody asked answers from and they didn't have anyone to collaborate or ask those questions from. So this was something that we faced that this was our gap at some point. And the last but not least was that what was different in case of Estonia? And I know that there are excellent projects that different other countries are doing, but the difference in Estonia is that we are doing policies, not so much project-based. We are trying to leave project-based approaches for experimental projects. And it often is the case that the ministries, it's easier to do projects because there are certain deadlines and money comes from EU and so on, but policy is much more trickier. So we do less or maybe more modest, but mainstream, but we build also sustainable ecosystem for the front runners to go crazy. And how, oh, okay. How we actually did this somehow is that we indeed empowered these networks more and more that we have had the educators networks in place for certain teachers, associations, they're not teachers unions only. They're actually the ones co-creating and sharing best practices and so on. This is, they're always, it's a sustainable approach and they are always operational. They get financial support for their summer camps and conferences and so on, but they are there. This is how we succeeded in sharing the information what was needed. So if there were best practices to adapt better methodology than the ones described by our previous speaker, that's not the old ways were somehow squeezed into this kind of new modern set-up, then this was the channel we shared the information. Ethics sector is something that we have built for four years now. It's again that it's not possible for private sector always to enter the universities building and open the doors and ask for this kind of advice. What we figured was that we are not able to set up control system, what kind of services are of high quality or not. So what we decided to do is to have this platform for already high quality service to be built. So we have the private sector companies, the educated teacher schools, as well as researchers building their services together. So to do everything right from the very beginning. I also mentioned in our break up tool before that what was challenging in there is that we realized that the weak spot in this platform was the workforce from researching research institutions because there was too few of them in education field. So they lack time and people to support the services coming from private sector and schools. So this is the weak spot. And what was, and also the third sector initiatives because, you know, Estonia's give also the image of we have to do everything right at the first place. So with no permission to fail, which is exhausting. What is the very good platform for experimenting and we need experimenting is the third sector initiatives. So providing support and having this cooperation platform with the third sector, letting them play is the way to go. And how we did it was financial incentives with the size of Estonia, we tried to hold everything as little fragmented as possible. So again, away from this project that faced approach and tried to keep everything together and make up. Crystal, sorry, one minute please. Yes, sure. Thanks. So this was the way to go. Not everybody is playing in their own corner, but we are in the same play together. And this is pretty much it. It sums up what I've already told. That we have been on this road for co-creation for a while now. We have learned our lessons so far. And I think the hub is excellent way to go because their current awareness in terms of what is there for education or what is not there is wider than we have all ever assumed. So everybody is willing to come up with new ideas, new services, the timing is right. And why it's also right is that usually in education field we suffer with this kind of awareness about how bad everything is. It's opportunity to actually build this kind of positive image, bad experiences. And as we heard also from the previous speaker, how difficult it was or it wasn't. So usually the ones pleased or satisfied or with good things are so much involved and they don't have the time to share it. But we need to build together this kind of good image of education and innovative mindset. And we must stay restless, which means that we always are up to something new and something better. And this is the mindset again we have in here. Of course, one thing that is also an important factor for Estonia when we also explain our results in PISA is that our schools are very autonomous and they usually use their tools and methodologies as they pleased. It was the same, the shift to the distance learning was also easier because the teachers were used to taking responsibility and choosing their tools, appropriate their teacher, appropriate to their teaching and also their students. A picture that is shared also with you about our newest education strategy might be of interest. And that's it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Christelle. This was an excellent and super interesting presentation. I think you touched on a lot of areas that are super relevant for the Hub as well. I'm gonna go in spirit of time, immediately present our final last presenters and then we can see if we still have some time after that for a possible Q and A to discuss a little bit more if there's any questions in the chat. So our next presenters are Donatella Solda and Damian Landfri. They are the founders and respectively director and vice director of future education Modena and they will give a presentation on sort of their model for acceleration of digital solutions in education and I think already in Christelle's presentation as well we saw at like has a very important role in this whole digital education ecosystem. So if you are ready, the floor is yours, Donatella. Thank you. Hi, hi everyone. Thank you. It's Donatella, Damian is here with us and will answer two questions in the case there, you address them. I will share the screen for a presentation and as you anticipated what we will be speaking about today is both an example of how we had several locations to interact about digital competence and digital education in different capacities. Previously, a few years ago, a couple of days ago we were researchers at the university and we were working in that capacity and then we moved to the Ministry of Education where we drafted a few policies related to this. And then since a couple of years we started a competent center developing services and activities related to ATT&CK. So related to the interaction between research, applied research and production of services and products for enhancing quality of digital education. Just, I will skim through the policies that we drafted and implemented why we were the Ministry of Education but I think it's important for the problem setting. Speakers before me mentioned the fact that to change, to make an impact on big numbers of former education, we are speaking mainly about K-12 now. It's central government has a lot to do and the impact can be delivered in a time span which is quite long because of the quantity of stakeholders that you involve. In Italy, as a form of an example, teachers amount to 750,000 plus an ecosystem of teachers involved in the education. So it's a, more or less a million of people to whose competent skills you need to advance and to thrive. Students are nine million. So when you speak numbers like this, then the impact of the policy can take quite some times to be demonstrated or to be promoted. What we did in 2015 was an organizational change so that we asked schools, each and every school to appoint a team for innovation. So currently, Italian schools, since five years, six years, have an innovation team with one PM, one project manager for innovation, which is a teacher, not an IT person who is in charge of the educational and methodological planning for their colleagues and for all the activities related to that. This actually came to help during COVID time because you had a unit within the school who would be the reference for all actions needed to be adopted. I will also mention a few words about what we are doing currently. Since 2018, we started an R&D for a tech in Italy. It's funded mainly by a foundation. So it's a body that encompasses the private sector, a philanthropy action, and speaks to, in social impacts, with social impact goals. But speaks also to the tech sector for private sector because we interact a lot with producers and startups and scale-up companies and small, medium enterprises developing for a tech to enhance quality. And I will show you a couple of elements of this manifesto that we promoted to enhance both the methodological part and the technical part of a tech. And last, I would mention an action that is being promoted recently, a few weeks ago. We started an alliance at the European level of centers of associations of tech startups and companies and accelerators to promote impact quality tech product and services. As it's clear that digital competencies of course need to be developed in formal and informal education spaces, but at the same time, they use students, teachers, parents, and society will be using products and services developed mainly by the private sector. So you need to operate also and very deeply to enhance the quality of private sector actors. We know that currently a tech solutions are not to be found only in editors and publishers, which are those fittings, learning space, physical learning spaces, but the private sector will show you a couple of numbers is a wide range of solutions in support of digital skills and digital education. A few words about our idea of the attack app that we developed. The three key pillars of what we think it's needed in a hub and it's actually, it came over help during COVID time is that our center is both a physical center and a competence center. So with a group of disciplinaries and I mean people with a background on certain subjects and methodological and cognitive neurosciences. And also, I mean, this way of working will operate as a bridge to research institutions already ongoing to translate what the research institutions are doing, are operating into something useful for schools, teachers, parents and society. What is missing, the missing link that we observed in our previous capacity at the Ministry of Education was that there is a lot of research done in many subjects, in many universities and research departments, which doesn't get to teachers and students and contents or society and companies. So what you really have is a gap between the fruitful impact of research outcomes and findings, which is not translated into and not embedded into solutions for schools and digital competence advancement. So you need to fill the gap. Our solution was to have a place. We are quite lucky because we are in a delightful landmark building in the city center of Modena. So the foundation gave us this big space in a historical, in a landmark building. We work, this future education of Modena works based on strategic programs, which are both methodological, so neurosciences and cognitive sciences, methodological sciences and disciplines like model language, linguistics, maths done through data sciences and computational design or logical mathematical discussion. And STEAM, so green science, food science and visual arts and whatever goes into the STEAM under the STEAM level. And we work through R&D units. So there is a set of people working on these units in a strict cooperation and partnership with research institutions at the national and international level. And they become a platform to produce different content, a continuous stream of contents for us that we test and prototype together with schools. So what we are doing is both to sustain, both to sustain the schools coming to us and just ask for a workshop or a day or a year of activities. But also we test continuously new solutions and we, in partner with universities that are able then to address and to fine tune the research goals with stakeholders involved. So in a way, we lower the overheads of research because we already have school students and stakeholders involved in the research for universities. And schools benefit by the fact that we bring to them the state of the art solutions from the research sector and the technological knowledge that we have. So this is the way of working of this future education model. This is the place that we developed in 2018. We are starting other places in other cities because we believe that a competent center located in a city center, it's of use both of the school sector, the city, what we call city learning. And it's a continuous, I mean, it's a new way of interpreting what digital competence is for a city and formal education sector. And this was of course of great use during COVID times because of course we were already there and we managed to accommodate a lot of different questions. Sorry, the slide was wrong. So what is a tech? I think that most of you will already know what is a tech but I think it's useful to make use of a couple of slides of a whole on IQ. And Navitas produce surveys about a tech globally. And as you can see, a tech is a wide range of solutions that go from credentialing to creation of contents to funding of students to lifelong learning to LMS. So what we see of course is that education through a tech expanded the range of product and services that before, if we think before, where narrow into the work of editors and publishers. So before you had a book and a couple of tools that you would use in the learning environments, now you have the digital environments, which is huge, which is really, really big. So the tech sector is very much into startups. So there are a lot of ideas incubated and accelerated in many, for many stakeholders. So it's a central to the job of a lot of venture capital. So there's a lot of movement into investments and we all read in the news about unicorns being funded, the SIBO, the new solution, the KAUT thing, the BORS online, these are all solutions that started as a small idea, got funded and then they scale up as big solutions globally used. So a tech sector is very high in the agenda of investors from the private sector. And so we think we thought both because of our past as a researchers and from our former capacity in the public sector, that this needs to be taken into account by public investments. As usually what we saw, the action of governments is directed to those who buy solutions and public investment doesn't really interact with those who produce solutions. So what you usually have is a demand of products and services, which is not ready to understand and to critically choose the best solution fitting for their goals. What you usually have is a demand which either you reject innovation because they don't understand it or they take the risk is that reject innovation or they take something which is a la mode, let's say this way, fashionable. So they do things that they believe it's innovative but maybe it's not relevant for their purposes. So what we are trying to do now is to demonstrate impact for tech solutions to build indicators and services to enhance quality and impact of tech solutions, both to enhance the private side, the market of solutions and to sustain schools and buyers of solutions into this aware choice of tech solutions. Donatella, one minute please. Yes, I was basically done. I think that's what is relevant. We perfectly know what are the challenges and opportunities of tech, of digital education. We know that the rapid change into the work, the job market into the society, societal change demands to feel the skill mismatch of every person in the society, both the young ones and the elders. What is an additional challenge is that education has an opportunity to be more relevant than was before as it's not concentrated into the first 20 years of life of people, but it's now spread. I mean, it's commonly accepted that education is part of the life growth of every one of us. So what is the goal of a policy dealing with the tech is to make people aware of this and sustain both demand and offer of solutions for this goal. Thank you very much, Donatella. This was again a very, very interesting presentation. It's really interesting to hear the perspective of the ad sector, ad tech sector, sorry, as well. Unfortunately, due to a bit of a delay, we're gonna have to skip the Q&A and sort of directly go into the breakout rooms, which I will give Anushka first the floor to explain a little bit what's going to happen there. Yes, first I would like to thank our three speakers, Christelle Romina and Donatella. I think that what you've been presenting today is really giving us already some interesting ideas for the digital education hub because I see that there are synergies that can be created among all the experiences that you were sharing. And I think that the old presentation fitting well as if you had been speaking to each other before giving these presentations, which you didn't because I could see a red threat of innovation being presented, but also of critical understanding of the use of digital technologies and also the ambitions and scope that resonated in all of your interventions. So I'm very sorry that we need to skip the Q&A questions but we really wanted to have another breakout room session. And basically the focus of this breakout room session is to discuss in a group of people in this very small group of people about cooperation. So all of you have been talking about cooperation today. And we would like to know how the digital education hub can support cooperation among researchers, predictioners, policymakers, private sector, schools, parents, and so on and so forth. So I will share here in the link the link to sorry in the chat link to Padlet. And we will have 10 minutes to be in the breakout rooms and discuss a small group about this cooperation. So if you ever experience any kind and I think most of us did any kind of cooperation between public and private or between policy and research or between research and practice or between research and ethics sector, for instance, what worked in this cooperation? What didn't work? And what was the unexploited potential for this cooperation? So Robert, could you please set up the breakout rooms? We're going to have more or less five or six people in the breakout rooms. And I'm putting the link of the Padlet in the chat now. Oh, sorry, this session has been recorded. It's the only one that has been recorded. They probably attached it to me when we moved. Whereas we cannot do the recordings for all sessions. So basically I think I will just mute now and open the floor. Were you able to open the Padlet and open the link? Yes, I wanted to warn you that there's only one word, there's strength and you can't see the other two. Ah, okay, anyhow. The idea would be to work on strength, weaknesses and unexploited ideas. I think that you should just, it's like posted, so maybe you'll put them all the way. Yeah, I can put them, yeah. Yes, I know that you understand better. We need to write the strength, weaknesses and unexploited ideas of the relation between research and practice. Where is the question that we should do? Of the cooperation, of the cooperation that were in place. Yes, so when you think about the cooperation between I don't know the policy DG and the research DG and the commission, for instance. What were the strength and weaknesses of this cooperation? And what were the ideas that were not pursued? So what was there that worked? What didn't work? And what simply didn't happen, but not because it was a weakness, but just because it didn't happen. Okay. So if you want, I can just break the ice a bit because we just have 10 minutes. Sure. I think that, for instance, okay, I've been working in both policy field and research field. And I think that one thing that I see that didn't work and I saw it from both sides was the different timing that there is. So I think this is a weakness. If you have a research project, I mean, you all know it as well. If you have a research project, it works in longer stretches. Whereas policy makers, they would like to have a reply tomorrow. They would like to have data tomorrow of things that happened just yesterday. So there is this cycle, the time cycle that is not aligned. I don't have a solution there, but I think it's a weakness. I totally agree with that. To me, it's also that it's not only that if you have, as a policymaker, you have a question that doesn't have an answer, then the timing of research results is longer than the policy cycle. So this, I totally agree. The other weakness is that policy is usually not unable to read clear findings from the research side. So I wouldn't say that research always give un-conclusive evidence, but when as a policymaker with the research background, I tried to base some policy solutions on research findings, it's difficult to find conclusive evidence because research is always open to accommodate different outcomes. So you always say in most of the cases like this, I mean, we were introducing bring your own device policy in Italy. So you needed a finding that would let you see whether using of mobiles in six years old was beneficial or detrimental. Usually the answer is it depends. So if you have a depends as a policymaker, you don't make use of it depends. I'm not saying as a former researcher that you need to find the different findings that it depends, but research should work into at least extract some evidence which could be of use of policy. Can I react to that? I bring my researcher's head. So I find that from the research side, it's always difficult to have this cause and effect, no kind of evidence. Because as a researcher, you're always aware that there are other factors influencing a certain conclusion or a certain behavior or a certain change. So you're always cautious that when you present your conclusions that there is some bias, because you are not doing this study in an experiment kind of environment, in a lab, in a room, in a lab. So at times it's very difficult to have this very conclusive that you say, yeah, if I bring your own device, it has positive learning objectives. No, it's very difficult because there are certain things where that kind of conclusion doesn't, it's not substantiated by data. So as a researcher, I cannot give you that kind of conclusion. Then something related to what Anushka said that at times, the timeframe is really interesting. Like you said, policymaker, so now COVID, policymaker would want already some decisions to make while we are still trying to understand what is happening. And at times I feel that we are missing longitudinal studies for the same, always preparing research for policy, to provide evidence for policymaking. But these longitudinal studies, so something that you are saying before now understanding how this self-learning kind of is happening, this is not only happening now, it has been happening already. So if there was some longitudinal study, then we can see how it has changed with COVID. So certain studies could also be done at a longitudinal pace, which is not exactly what the policymaker needs, but which will be useful in five years time, for instance. To build on what you said, I think that we can also say, first of all, the longitudinal studies is key and should be the real investment from the public sector. To have something ongoing for a very long span of time is the secret to measure. I mean, it's the anchor for other projects, shorter projects to work so that you have terms of comparison of your intervention. Of course, you cannot reproduce a lab, a wide space with no interactions. But at least you have some certain data to have a look at. Just to be positive and speak about strength, research can give a solid basis on certain decisions that otherwise are driven by political instances. So to ground decisions into a benchmark, I'm trying to make it as a strength, but it's still a weakness because policymakers are, you know, unable to read research. So it's like a need. And more than a strength is an opportunity, so to speak, that policymakers need to be able to access and read research findings. There's not such a culture of reading literature. But the strength is that if they read it, then they can use it. Let's put it this way. I have a dream to not tell them. I'd like to make an academy for policymakers. We can do it together. You know, after being there in seven years, we got to understand so many processes. It's recorded, so I cannot say too much. So many things that you say. It's so simple. It's so simple. You know that it was by accident. That's two PhDs were in a cabinet office of three ministers. And we had the methods. We had the mythological approach of PhD that you need. First you read, you compare, and then you take the decision. This is, you know, your one would say it's amazing. But it's not always like this. So to have an academy for policymakers, which is not based on administrative law or, you know, on how to design a function. Yeah, because that they can do. Yeah, they can do. Then we can do it together at the academy. I mean, I'm sure that's... Look, it would be, I think it would be very important for the hub to explore these kind of things. Because one of the things we would like to do with the hub is to create this brokering between research, policy and practice. And one interesting thing that Romina, you know, probably better than I do this part, is that, you know, the GRC is one of the... is the research center of the commission. So in a way, the think tank of the commission. One of the things that they are doing, which I found very interesting is this academy, actually, for making research relevant for policy. And this is quite interesting, I think. So it's the... Romina helped me. Policymaking hub, is it called? I think it's called the EU... Yeah, it starts with the... Okay, nevermind. So it's the same one, okay. Yeah, we were looking to the name and I remember it. Well, this is the unexploited idea. So make a bridge between research, a clearer bridge between research. If I may add something, the stakeholder, I mean, in Italian it's called terza missione. So it's the additional goal for universities to demonstrate impact into society. And usually abroad in the UK, you have to work a lot for this. I mean, I remember in the various universities, I've heard that there's always this role for universities to make, to exploit the results of their action. But there is a simplification, I think. A simplification needs for research. I mean, oversimplifying the findings of research... Oh, it's bad. Romina was mentioning that conclusive evidence can create... I mean, unconclusive evidence represented as conclusive can create, you know, damage more than benefit. But to translate findings into something useful for the public, it I think needs to be pushed and promoted far, you know, in a more assertive way. Yeah, it's this brokering aspect. And I think, you know, Romina, you did it very well in your presentation today. You were really speaking to everyone, to the wider public. So that is part of it, I think. I think we need to go back to the main room and we will close this session. Thanks a million, thanks a million to both. Thank you. Thank you. So, I think we're all back. And I would like just to close this session by first of all thanking everyone and then by announcing to everyone that yesterday a call for support services for the Digital Education Hub came out. So if you want to have a look in the tendering, we are having this call for organizations to support us in the setup of the hub, of the Digital Education Hub, in the setup of its community, but also in the setup of its activities for the next three years. I hope you can all have a look at this call and help us promoting it among your stakeholders and partners. And I hope that many of you will be there in this session. Oh, I just got your frozen. And for me, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, can you hear me? Yeah, you're back. Yeah, switch over the video. Okay, so thank you. Thank you, Leonie. So I would like to thank Romina, Christel and Donatella for their excellent presentation and Donatella for their actions and for putting us in a few seconds. And I would like to thank you all for attending this session. And I hope that we can cooperate in the Digital Education Hub and I hope to see you all as part of the community of the Hub. Leonie, I don't know if you want to say a few words just to close this session as well. Ah, Leonie for the Hub. Yes, I definitely, yes. I want to thank you all for attending this session. I've really, really enjoyed it. The discussion in our breakout room is also very interesting. I was just explaining the question and then we went back to Plenary. But yeah, again, thanks also for my side to all the speakers. This has been really, really excellent. And I hope we can stay in touch. Please feel free to contact us. If you have any further questions or best practices you'd like to share, the paddle as well is still online. So you can still add some sticky notes there if you still have some remaining ideas. And I think this is it from our side. So thank you very much and have a lovely afternoon.