 So, good morning everyone, good afternoon some of you are already in the afternoon, in certain countries it's already morning, it depends on the time zone and on the cultural customs. My name is Alfredo Sueira, I'll be the moderator, I'm a member of Board of Eden and I'm very glad to be with three very relevant presenters about the topic of this webinar and I'm sure that you will enjoy the seminar, we will accept questions, short questions after each presentation but for the longer questions or the ones that require more time we will deal with them at the end of the session. So, again I would like to thank you for being here and I hope that you enjoy it. We have now for the first presentation we have my colleague from Eden, Professor Timothy Reed from the UNED which is the Open University in Spain, I don't know if you know but it's a very large university, very prestigious and with a large number of students and he's vice president also of Eden and he will present his impressions about the ECHO system, you'll explain what it is but let me tell you that personally it's very good to work with Tim, he's a very nice person to work with, he's very knowledgeable and I hope that you enjoyed his presentation. Tim go ahead please. Thank you very much Alfredo for the opportunity of presenting today, let's see if I can share my screen, I think I can. Let's see if I can, here we are. Right, so in my presentation today I'm going to talk about the difficulties in trying to obtain the recognition and validation of prior learning in its different forms and what we might want to do or hope to be able to do to try and solve some of these problems and I speak from experience here because I've suffered as a student, I suffered as a university lecturer trying to participate in the recognition process of other students who are asking for this sort of recognition and also as part of the university body trying to improve the system. Now the first thing which might appear to be a bit of a surprise is that there's actually no automatic UI recognition of any kind of academic diplomas, the commission I guess with good criteria say it's the responsibility of the different institutions which I suppose it makes sense but it's a little tricky and a little difficult for the students who are trying to embrace this freedom of movement in a study that's available at the European level. The flip side of the coin of course is that the commission also doesn't recognize or validate the institutions themselves and there's quite a competitive marketplace, the universities and other entities are offering different forms of higher education courses are trying to demonstrate that their courses are quality courses and are worth studying by international students and the commission doesn't actually participate in this process. Now all is not completely lost because there are there was a lot of work that's been done at a different European levels about how an institution might want to undertake this recognition process, I mean I've got a couple of the many examples on the on the screen here, the second edition in 2016 of the European Recognition Manual for ATIs which gives some very good guidelines, you've got the link there and also if we go back as far as 2004, the OECD published a document which is also very relevant and provides some interesting information that can be used by an institution trying to participate in this process but there's certain reticence on the part of the ATIs trying to recognize and validate because in a way it's the fear of opening the floodgates, if I start to recognize particular qualifications that are coming from a particular source, am I endangering the quality of my own teaching in a way, I'm providing like a backdoor into our particular courses. Now the National Recognition and Information Centre in the UK, NASA, NARIS also provided a very good guide on this particular subject, it's quite a big document and it goes country by country and provides indications on how these sorts of recognition can be undertaken, so another example that's actually available, one that is quite pertinent for me is this process of homologation, which we have here in Spain because it's something I had to suffer about 30 years ago when I came here and if you want to work in industry like in a lot of countries then it really only matters what the potential employer says, is this qualification valid or not, does this person know what they claim to know, yes or no, they can hire you, if it doesn't work out you get kicked out, but if you want to work in public administration or education then you need to have officially recognized titles qualifications and I had to get my degree and my PhD on monogado recognized before I could actually start working in the university and I must admit the Ministry of Education here have done a pretty good job and this process is pretty pain-free these days, but when I did it, as I say 30 years ago, I had to go along to the Ministry, I had to buy two books to detail the process and it took me three months of my life to prepare all the documentation in order to get this done, it was a painful experience but I was lucky and I got through it. Okay, so if you are a student looking to try and gain this sort of this recognition, well the good news is that things are a lot better these days, I mean I've got a couple of examples here, this one from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany and you can see they've gone to a lot of trouble of preparing a fact here on the sorts of questions that any student might have about how they might get their recognition done, so this is a lot of good information that's available for students. At my own institution, UNED, as Alfredo said before, we've got somewhere in the region of 200,000 students and we get a lot of students who come from outside, students who have studied at national level, international level, they're trying to get some of their previous prior learning recognised and we've tried very hard to get different ways of doing this put into process. So first of all, if you want to get a recognition from a national level, we've got a set of forms that need to be filled out, these go at an institutional level, down to a faculty level and then eventually down to departmental level and for example what will typically happen is as a lecturer on a couple of subjects, I would get a folder coming in my in my pigeonhole where now it's all electronics, this will lock down at home, but before it would be on paper and I'd have a student coming from a particular university who would be trying to get his subject validated or recognised as my subject, so I would check the number of credits, I'd check the structure, ratio of theory to practice, etc and I could decide yes or no, give a justified reasoning and then say if I want this to happen automatically in the future and this is good but there's an awful lot of universities in the world and it's a lot of work for the teaching staff. At the second level we have this idea of recognition of international studies so the idea here is that we have students coming from abroad who want to get part of a degree or a whole course recognised and there's a whole process set up for this and then finally a much more ad hoc but flexible initiative, it's this idea of cross institutional agreement and as you can see at the moment we've got about 15, nearly almost 16,000 of these institutional agreements actually established, the process for which is on the right-hand side of the screen and it actually enables for example two institutions, so for example if I'm doing a master's on a particular kind of technological application and there's a similar course in a university with which I collaborate then it's interesting to get some by direction recognition set up but while this works as the thing that can be seen from firstly from this is that the sorts of agreements that we get out of them are in a way a bit ad hoc, they're written slightly differently which makes it different difficult if you like to process this in a structured manner although a lot of work has actually gone into this process and it will be continued to be improved over time but the thing is that even doing it with the best intentions in the world and knowing what we are doing the preparation time can take somewhere in the region of two to six months so it's a tricky process and let's imagine, well I'll leave that point for a little, in fact I'll leave that point for this slide here, I mean what I'm saying now is that if things before back in the day were complicated then at the moment they were even more complicated because we started off with credentials and certificates, diplomas etc which were quite a large atomic units controlled at an institutional level and now we're coming down to a smaller level and now we're playing with micro credentials different kinds of studies that a particular student might want to have done or undertaken so for example I'm offering MOOC courses so a student can do one of my MOOCs and in some cases I give one ECTS for a particular MOOC but what does that really mean for the student? It means that they've got one ECTS which is recognized by the UNED, it's offered by UNED but what can the student actually do with that one ECTS? I mean at my institution for example it can be used in exchange for free credits on a particular degree that's not a particular problem but then if the student wants to go one step further on and then try and use that credit instead of part of a subject then that's a lot harder because then they would have to have the support of the teaching team and eventually a decision would be needed to be taken at a faculty level and if the student wants to then for example go to a different country and try and get some kind of validation for that credit then things could be even even harder so it's a non-trivial task that needs to be solved. What are we doing to try and solve this problem? Well I say half tongue in cheek here then there are standards a nice thing about standards is so many to choose between like this in many other areas. A lot of progress is being made however and it will be interesting to see how this helps in the medium term. I mean for example initiatives like the EDCI, the data credentials infrastructure is being used by Europas which could represent a very solid way of standardizing the recognition and representation should we say of different kinds of micro credentials on the other hand the the European MOOC consortium a lot of well several big powerful MOOC players have got together to work on this common micro credential framework so work is being undertaken and we are moving forward on that but we're still unfortunately a long way away from a simple solution for the students and for the institutions at the same time. What's another related issue here? Well as I say here as well he would pay the piper, calls the tune. I mean the slide which I've taken from the European University Association we can see there's more than 800 HCI members in Europe. There's a lot of institutions producing degrees professional certification free and open micro credentials that's one particular part of the marketplace but at the other end of the spectrum we've got the corporate players that are doing more corporate training. So for example Microsoft is an excellent example here they've been producing a Microsoft certification for many many years and if you're a software engineer and you're wanting to work with Microsoft technology then having one of these Microsoft certificates is the way to go arguably perhaps more so than professional certification from a public university but nonetheless when you're moving between these two particular worlds in a way I mean Microsoft trained Microsoft skills but maybe you want to learn about the general area of technological solutions you do of course from a European institution I mean how can you gain if you like the same level of quality recognition for both courses. Another player who's entered recently in the field here is Google as well so the thing here the reflection I think we need to make is that if we're moving towards a more kind of corporate university structure will they be competing with the European universities and in which case what can we actually do to provide an across the board recognition process. Okay so from an academic perspective we've been working on this in for some years now I was in a the Rasmus Plus project OEPAS working on the micro data the metadata for a structure which we would actually use this feel like as a passport for representing this information there was the project's micro HE and now micro vault which are looking at the feel like the flip side of the coin of this particular issues about the recognition framework metadata structures and the technological infrastructure to make more agile processing systems and what are the spin-offs here is Credit Incify which is a blockchain solution for actually storing different kinds of micro credentials. Okay and the current project I'm going to briefly talk about is ECOE the European Credit Clearinghouse for opening up education and I've already given two presentations in the context of Eden about this particular project like I gave one at last year's summer conference in Timis Wider and also in the Lisbon Research Workshop we had a couple of weeks ago on different aspects of the project so I don't want to go over the same ground you can find those presentations on online but I think that we are trying to if you like help towards the agility this kind of this process this problem of recognition and validation okay you've got a list of the the partners of the the project here the project's very skillfully managed by Deborah Arnold at Foundation UNID in France there's the other partners you can see taking part and if you like the ecosystem is our attempt to actually produce some kind of overall technologically-enabled infrastructure for actually making the whole process of recognition and validation between higher educational institutions more agile quicker working toward if you like some kind of fast track toward this actual situation we fully appreciate that this sort of system will never be established as if you're like a European standard system what it will be used to use right across the the board however the European Commission is interested in finding solutions to this sort of problem and we are hoping that the sorts of outputs we can produce from the research project will provide if you like proofs of concept that can then can be extended and worked upon at a European level and included in in different in different solutions that they actually work towards in the in the future and these are different parts of the system here we have the quality criteria if you like which is actually really really important you have a common if you like metadata structure of quality elements to actually make it possible to compare different credentials micro credentials some different higher educational institutions then the model credit recognition agreement and the system which i'm going to talk about now and then if you like a a library of approved modules and then the technological infrastructure that will that will pull this whole whole system together this if you like is a conceptual abstraction of the of the overall system i say that because it's very much a working process and we haven't finished this yet but the idea if you like is to is to provide not just a tool but a way of storing these particular templates so that once you start to think about how you're going to if you like work toward this kind of recognition validation process then you can actually see what other examples exist and then have a template and a tool which actually makes the whole process more agile and easier to and easier to undertake one of their distinctions we wanted to make based upon some definitions that have been provided in the literature on my colleague i ran peltheta my colleagues back in 2018 was if you like the difference between recognition and validation there's a whole world of vocabulary and associated with these with these particular processes which are a little difficult to to understand we're not necessarily if we understand but you really need to understand them to actually make the most of what's actually documented and one of the important ones for us was this difference between recognition and validation and whereby recognition is really the process of certifying or processing qualifications that come from within higher education institutions and validation are it's a similar process but for micro credentials that are coming outside possibly from corporate offerings like a moot platform for for example okay so when we actually started this process what we tried to do was to analyze the kinds of recognition and validation pathways or prior learning that existed at partner high education institutions now with a lot of us with a lot of analysis there are many different ways you can actually structure this but we decided to to adopt the structure a layer of structure if you like so as you can see here there's the kinds of recognitions that happen at an institutional level so for example a particular qualification that's recognized at that level could therefore be applied at any particular course degree masters or other kinds of training right across the board and then there is the other examples which are done at a particular faculty level and within those you've got the separation between non-formal and and formal learning we started off with the partners in the in the project and then as we're going through the piloting we'll be moving towards a more open structure and what we noticed was that it was a if you like a certain core uniform structure that we could associate with each particular kind of recognition agreement first of all the type of agreement the particular objective we're trying to achieve the number and steps if you like the process steps that have to go through to produce a particular agreement and then if you like the contextually dependent constraints that need to be applied when we when we did we produced a first version of this tool which was a Google Form and documentation for that and we've just finished going through the internal peer review of this process and we've got the the results back from that I put them in this table to to illustrate that that we've had quite a bit of feedback good quality feedback from our partners and we've undertaken analysis of this feedback and produce comments and updates to what we really need to do before we undertake the public presentation and I mean the image I put at the top right this slide is a bit tongue-in-cheek but I mean but it's very true in a way I mean if you're focusing too hard you're too close to the problem then sometimes it's difficult to actually see the overall context which quite often is what is the difficult part for the people who are wanting to to use this system is where you can say this in another way by saying you know if you're too close to the trees you can't see the forest and in a way the the problem is that when you're the sort of people from the institutions who are undertaking this this process are quite often in different kinds of departments and they're focusing on different kinds of objectives and short-term goals and when you try and present a tool which makes this process potentially easier for them then it's very difficult for them to understand exactly how it fits in with what they want so one of the results we've had under this process is the need to bring to develop a set of use cases and workflows so for example if we were trying to get a unidirectional recognition of a particular course between two institutions you know who the actors are actually participating in this process and what are the steps they're going to have to go through you know who's in charge of changing the documents etc and that's a little bit of sort of like where we are at the moment trying to provide this this overall context now the new time the new version of the this MRCA tool was we began to to try internally in November but the actual public review will will take place in in january of next year this is a wordpress version of the same document and we still got to a few technical cheating problems to sort out here related to the gdpi issues so you have to actually have to have agree to to share your your data with other members of the consortium and people who want to use the system before actually getting in there and and I'm also trying to ease the use of of the tool so coming towards the end now as I said at the beginning recognition validation is a difficult process it is a source of thought for institutions and students but I think in the way that the European Commission said that they have been saying for some some years now it is a priority if you want to have a united states of Europe and we want to make it easier for people to move from one country to the other then we need to make it easier and more transparent we just have like a level playing field for everybody so they don't have to get stuck in in dead ends of not being able to if you like get their qualifications sufficiently well recognized to be able to work or carry on the studies and these this problem perhaps is harder than it was a decade ago because now we've got a whole different ballpark of potential qualifications that a student can do we've got the micro credentials we got non-formal learning we've got professional training placement studies there's a whole lot of different kinds of qualifications that need to enter into this into this cooking bowl in a way so takeaway what have we tried to do well we started off recognizing this problem have existed that some good work has been done on particular standards moving towards receiving European support to move this whole issue forward and we have tried to produce a particular system that can be a proof of concept of how this whole process might be made more agile as I mentioned before the real public open public piloting of at least the MCRA tool but also the quality criteria we're starting in January of next year and be open for a month so please don't miss it we'll have information on our website how you can participate in this in this process it really gives us the opportunity to explore the sorts of issues that are actually present in this recognition validation process okay one of the underlying objectives of this work in a way is to see if we can move closer towards this kind of fast track for recognition and validation as I said before about my own institution when we're thinking about national qualifications that's in a way the idea that there a student will come along with some kind of qualification and if I studied it once for that particular institution and I've said yes then it should be automatic for all students from the institution that's good what's the problem where there are a lot of institutions so if in some respect we can learn from that process and we can say okay if this particular institution has a certain set of characteristics produced of qualifications that also have a certain quality criteria then why can't I just apply them to similar institutions why can't we just try and make that whole process more agile that might be a step towards this fast track for for recognition and verification and if you like the flip side of that argument is that maybe we can be inspired in a way by the way that industry works because industry they're I think they're more open to accepting qualifications from a more diverse set of areas so for example if someone comes along and claims to have particular competencies in I don't know in marketing and economics well that won't necessarily get them a job for life in fact it won't it will give them the opportunity to start working and if you can see that they're not really up to speed on that then they'll have to go and find their employment somewhere else so I think we need to be slightly more flexible about the way we consider this whole process of recognizing qualifications. Final point for you to think about and for me to think about as well for that matter is that it's actually likely that this problem will ever be resolved in the future and I suppose we could be more or less optimistic positive or perhaps more skeptical it's a very complicated problem and I also can feel deep down inside that institutions tend to be very conservative at least public institutions public universities we tend to be very conservative because there is that fear that we've worked very hard for many years to get our quality levels established and recognized and if we start to open the floodgates and have lots of students bringing in different kinds of training certificates from other areas that might actually affect us in a negative way and I think that the important thing here which the project insists upon is this idea of trust that I should begin to establish collaborative quality recognition and validation verification certificates with different institutions then the process hopefully will become easier and quicker. Okay thank you very much I'm going to stop there I've still got a few minutes in case there's any questions and I'll hand back to you Alfredo. Thank you Tim. Very interesting presentation we have three questions I guess we have time for one or two and the first is from Fortunato Sorrentino and the question is about support by EU institutions I guess he means financial support but he can correct me if I'm wrong because he says that such initiatives without support don't travel very far do you have anything to say? I quite agree with him I think it's difficult I think you know it's a combination of top down and bottom up support on the one hand at a particular institution if you're finding that you're receiving a request from the students to for recognition of their parts of their prior learning so they can do they can study with you then you're motivated to do it and therefore you provide resources from your particular institution but on the other hand I mean I think what's underlying your question and I completely agree with you is if we want this to be done in a systematic way across Europe then the the commission not only needs to lead in terms of providing guidelines and indication but I think also some kind of financial support exactly what form that would take it's it's difficult to to know I don't know some kinds of quality frameworks or or particular sorts of projects which enable you to apply European standards at an institutional level but I think we do need to be supported. Yes for tonight we've had a political regulatory but I think you answered also that aspect. A second question that it's also very quick is from Ecuador and he thanks the webinars but the question is are those pathways that you suggest available on the European Union or they include the other parts of Europe and I guess the rest of the world. Well this is in the ECHO projects in Erasmus Plus K203 project and if you search the website for ECHO you can find all of our processes documented we have our reports and stuff on the applicable outside of the European Union was quite possibly because we've used quality criteria and I think the and the structure of the the way that courses are structured at at international level I think are pretty standard so I would have thought a large part if not all of them would be directly applicable. Good and the third question that it's very quick it's from Jacoumy what does FUD mean? I mean something I thought it was on the slide fear uncertainty in doubt. No it was out of the of the of the session for a moment. Okay no it's fear uncertainty in doubt it's a term that was brought to you by marketing I think I don't know it was back in the 80s I forget if you remember when that was when it started to be used but that's what it means if you google it you'll you'll see. Okay team thank you very much if there are other questions we will handle them at the end. So it's my pleasure now to to introduce the second speaker and I don't know how to pronounce the last name we know each other for many years but I I guess I never tried to pronounce her name it's Alicia Miklashvist Miklavvist Miklashvist. Oh well not even close sorry Alicia. I know Alicia for a long time and she represents here a very important organization that connects higher education and professional education and training the vet world what is designated although I personally don't agree with these differences but it is what it is and Alicia works and represents Eureche she has been working for a long time in the area of vet and professional education and the title is connected with the webinar smart equality at workplace learning so Alicia the floor is yours. Thank you very much I must say that I'm sorry but due to so many different tools that we use now to have online conferences something went wrong and my camera is not communicating again so I'm sorry that we cannot see each other but that's it you will see our my presentation and you're very welcome to make and come with any questions. Yes I will be talking about smart equality at work based learning and what is the main thing that really a professional higher education and vocational education and training have in common is really the work based learning part or of course we have many different words with slightly different meanings like apprenticeships internships etc but at the end what they all have in common it means that we are talking about the substantial part that the student is experiencing in a company so like a real life work experience where he can connect the theoretical and practical skills it definitely boosts employability sorry and because of it because this special communication between the world of work students and institutions the strategy of such institutions are definitely different and different they are simply because the perspectives of these three stakeholders are completely different students are usually there because they are highly motivated to really gain skills that will allow them to transfer to the labor market as soon as possible um of course in their own field of interest uh and for their own self-development employers or companies are usually the ones who are trying to be as competitive as possible and that's why they want to improve the set of skills that they have within their stuff and the phg institutions or educational institutions may be vet or professional high education what they want to do is to really equip the students with the relevant skills and in order to do so they usually need to definitely take care of curricular development and especially teachers teaching stuff development um if we go further on now how do we align all these different perspectives to assure really quality of work-based learning um in order to do so we try to to use digital tools uh and to use it why because we want to make it quick simple and effective uh to measure students progress and to monitor students progress as well by the company as well by the student as well as by the phg institution and to make the process of the work-based learning or apprenticeship as transparent as possible um i don't know but i think that quite many of you have this uh experience of sending quite a few hundreds of students out of your institution for the work-based learning part and most of you apart from visiting them there you really don't know what is going on and while i was doing uh working at the position where i had to supervise so this work-based learning part of our students which took part took place for at least two and a half to three months um i was angry after one year a student came back uh and didn't really achieve all the great competencies and that's why i was always trying to find the way how to really uh deal with the quality part already before and now after the apprenticeship work-based learning part is finished so that's why we develop a package uh first one uh we prepared a package with indicators and measurement criteria what is really a quality management uh uh uh apprenticeship so how to really uh prepare a quality uh work-based learning and you can see that we prepare 19 quality criteria for higher education institutions and then for companies or SMEs why do i put here SMEs simply because we know that usually more than 95 percent of all companies uh that we work with are small and medium-sized enterprises and also more than 95 percent of jobs are offered in small and medium-sized enterprises so for us they're very important and usually the multinationals uh have a very well developed own system of recruiting etc so that's why we focused how to help really SMEs um then uh you know that most of the part and especially those coming from the institutions might not be happy with it but definitely once the institution has uh a work-based learning integrated in the curricula it really is the institutional responsibility to make sure that the work-based learning part is really a quality one so that it really applies to all agreed standards um and we divided a few criteria based on who can influence more which of this criteria and the first one that you can see here the involvement of stakeholders in designing learning objectives is the one where we think all of the stakeholders should be included so students, companies, institutions and of course authorities especially in Slovenia where for example we have in vet and also in short cycle we have national study programs so here definitely the authorities also have to be included but definitely this inclusion of all the stakeholders is important and then you can see definitely uh the definition of smart learning objectives is also something that institutions are really uh the ones that should be providing transparency definition of standards for placements identification or finding placements we usually nevertheless use the opportunity in our colleges to ask students to go and search for the right placement for them but simply because this is somehow of a very good way to see how it is to look for a job as well so this is one way of giving them the opportunity of course to experience also that part and and it is also a process of teaching and learning there as well and then we also I think that institutions are also definitely have to work on capacity building for uh companies that they are really able to provide quality apprenticeships of course then we have to do the placement supply the database this is something that we can offer the data protection and then comes the matching students the placement the monitoring of activities from SMEs and students then we uh definitely always support uh any kind of issue resolution and we do the evaluation process the assessment designed and also how the assessment is performed and monitored by the SMEs as well as grading certification if I also connect to the presentation that was done before also recognition how do we uh perhaps recognize some work uh that has been done already by the student before and also then we have to deal also with complaints in the pills you see that on the part of the enterprises what we expect is really to prepare for the apprenticeship they are the only ones that can really see how they can do this within their enterprise but the institution is here also to support them and build the capacity of each SME to do that they have the the SMEs also have to identify suitable mentors establish the agreements that the students institution and the company will be working under match students with the placement usually SMEs are very much interested in finding the right student for their company of course they have to take care of the integration of the apprentice into the working culture of the company the mentoring taking records of the apprenticeship assessment evaluation at at the end the quality assurance procedures if anything should be so this was a really lengthy and dull one we also prepared the work-based learning charter with the basic uh principles that need to be you will see that it is quite similar to the for those of you who already know it the rosmus plus charter because the rosmus under the rosmus mobility charter you can also offer placements out they are quite uh in line now how can digitalization really or digital uh tools really faster that and png transparency for this what we develop is a prototype a digital tool prototype where students all the time can overview how they what competencies they are going to gain during this work-based learning and how they are progressing in each competence during their uh work-based learning part the employer has a selection mechanisms for his uh apprentices or future potential employees and also a very easy to use mentoring and reporting tool and then the college gains an easy overview of students progression although you can't be at 500 companies at the same time every day looking how your students are really doing but through this tool you can check and immediately see if they are progressing or not and then of course you also gain valuable feedback from employers on student skills um here is a very long list of many other things that uh this tool and prototype really offers to each and every one uh of this the three stakeholders i would leave it to any of your questions if you would have any uh and we can discuss it later and would go further to uh an upper level uh not only on the institutional but also upper level so how can this digitalization really foster flexibility agility and resilience of vet and phd institutions this is something that we now is being asked of institutions and all institutions really want to achieve this this flexibility and agility and uh how do we see that this tool can be helpful is simply because uh you have a competence trans tracking system or skills trans tracking system how uh you instantly and regularly see what is the skill gap of what your students are able to do are skilled to do and what are the evaluations of the companies of course it is on the uh on the institution to check is this uh something that the ins that the students should already be skilled to do and uh it is the failure of the uh program the teaching process or the luck of students uh engagement at that time that they didn't get the skills that they should or are those new skills for which we have to adapt our curricula and upgrade this curricula to for the students to be able for example next year to gain those skills this way if we have this tracking system to identify such skills gap and skills forecasts on a local regional national and EU level it would be much easier for us to uh focus how to upgrade immediately the uh the curricula and immediately answer uh be flexible and answer to the uh requirements of the labor market then also we have to identify upskilling and rescaling needs in the labor market here i'm specially uh pointing out at the employers of this same uh employees of this same companies uh companies are changing the technology is changing and the skills that they need from their their employers are also changing the problem is what we have seen this last years before the corona crisis is that usually when the employers don't feed the new uh skills needed skills that needed what usually employers do is uh they those uh employees are made redundant and they are looking on the labor market for new ones with those skills but usually they don't exist so there there are not enough uh there's no not enough working force out there uh and many and uh many companies really fight with this problem of feeling in the skills gap instead of what we are should be offering them is simply to up and to rescale the employees that they already have there and that are already integrated in the company culture and they function already within that culture and of course lifelong learning programs and micro credentials that have been already mentioned uh are of uh incredible help here uh and are the future and this tool had definitely helps us find those skills up skilling and rescaling uh short programs and opportunities for the institution uh during oops sorry a bit back uh during the coronavirus we could see that we 90 percent of the uh curricula theoretical part of curricula were done online uh more or less successfully because we immediately had to go to this distance learning but 90 percent of word-based learning europe-wide and world-wide wasn't really uh materialized and you know that for our programs that uh study programs and professional higher education programs where you have up to 40 and up to 50 percent of your curricula is word-based learning this means that 50 up to 50 percent of your curricula was not materialized which is a problem i'm not saying that we can do all the word-based learning uh at distance i'm not saying that we can do it in the same way for all different uh scientific fields because that's simply not true for example it is much easier to make the distance word-based learning for it programs for multimedia etc because they do it mostly already uh online or virtually but if we are talking about very hands on uh uh study programs such as i don't know uh mechanical engineering or uh things like that in or wood wood uh design this might be a bit uh more difficult but nevertheless there are opportunities at least some part of this word-based learning part to put online either through virtual reality augmented intelligence etc the next thing that can be done through the tool is graduate tracking which we know is very important uh to really know which how good are we and our graduates doing and then we are definitely looking forward to link our tool to europe us esco eq f a covet and e s cheese now if i go on uh yes digitalization definitely there are a lot of things going on how that can help us really go digital in word-based learning so we prepare this smart electronic word-based learning monitoring system that i just uh explain to you we also are working on us uh on a pilot for selfie vbl which is a tool developed by jrc from the commission uh which helps you assess digital readiness it is developed in all eu languages and it is free to use and uh really used for diagnose able so that you will be able to diagnose how digital are you really and in which parts you can develop further on then we have also as a means support packages to really create the capacity of as a means to go on with word-based learning the vbl criteria the support for mentors of full support online for mentors the regional development etc i wouldn't go on here further you can check all the links then afterwards what i wanted to mention uh most important is that we should really embrace uh this kick that that we were given to go digital uh with this corona virus so we will we all have to go suddenly digital uh and i think it is a big opportunity and we should really really embrace the opportunities that we are given with it but nevertheless we should never forget uh the challenges uh and what do i mean here by challenges is that many teachers and students don't have the accessibility to to equal uh internet to to uh equal access to uh uh um computers and software that is needed to work distant and uh one thing that perhaps isn't so much connected to work-based learning but i think is very important and we don't stress it enough uh the minute we go digital we lose some kind of a connection and communication to our students and teachers and staff etc and each of us is then going on being developed in their own internet and social media bubble and for this we have to equip our students to be able to critically think which information which scientific documents etc and scientific uh uh uh also tools and uh research documents etc are out there how to check really critically think and check which ones are the uh approved true ones and which are not um and this is something that we also forget to teach the teaching stuff because the teaching stuff was now put into or pushed into this situation and many times the teaching stuff is 55 plus and they are not all very equipped to deal with this so in this way we still have to do quite a lot so uh really create capacity on the teachers and students side on critical thinking and without that there is no profession and with this i would say thank you very much and live your dreams aim higher as you have here our own logo and as this is one of the events within the european skills week which is taking part this year in berlin but we will all be distant present there uh i hope that we will see each other face to face during the european skills week 2021 in selenia so thank you very much and if you have any questions you're very welcome thank you all you said it was very nice to have this overview from your rush i think that um uh there were many suggestions and many many examples of the application of the digital tool and i have just one question for you is this smart work-based learning tool available soon for everyone or yes by the end of november we have our final conference on 26th of november we are now at the really really final testing of this prototype the prototype will be available online for everybody to play with it and what we really want to do because we have quite uh many colleges and institutions asking for to develop it into real tool this is now a prototype the prototype is made in such a way that each institution can really attach it to the existing database uh and usual uh digital system that you use for your own institution database with the names of students etc so this is just an attachment so you don't need to enter data as names etc that is needed it just is i don't know an attachment it takes automatically the data that is needed in and then the output are the grades or whatever you need so uh we already tested it within our institutions and integrated it directly into the slovenian system for higher vocational colleges and they will start using it with the next study year so all our colleges will start using it with the next study year they are hardly waiting to do so and yes what we find is the best in it for us on as a national association is that we will have a really a clear vision of the forecast of skills from the employers for each region which will give us clear directions which way the curriculum should be updated this is for us on national level for example important thank you i'll have the third speaker and i'll make some comments at the end if there is time the third speaker is mati is okalia he's from philand uh is an old friend also from the group of that providers and um you agreed that you would talk on this webinar on digital tools in that about the experiences in philand and explain us a little bit what's going on and what the does eu-pro vet which is a big organization of vet providers european one uh is also contributing to this subject so mati the floor is yours for the the screen is yours okay thank you and uh may i have immediately the slide number two next one please uh yes thank you alfredo it's too nice to have this spot to share a couple of examples of what's happening with the digital tools and digital uh working in a vocational education and and training and as you have noticed we have her reads from top down and now we are hitting the grassroot level as as alfredo mentioned i'm currently the president of eu-pro vet one of these european vet associations my daily job is uh as a director here in one of the regional vet providers here in the western part of the philand uh these two cases are uh very different cases the first one is a very holistic approach in one of the finished vet provided named merkuria and another one is uh uh example what let's say typical study counselor in vet school use what digital tools are used how they are working there and what is common in these two examples that they have a very strong pedagogical consideration and approach behind these what is very easily to see so next slide please and as you can see here is something that i have to set the scene uh this is something that has been happening and been a reality for things for a couple of years and it means that uh students living primary education or secondary education are totally familiar with the digital world with high-speed internet access and uh so practically all have smartphones and we have very competitive telemarket uh in practice all phone accounts has unlimited internet and and the monthly fee is based on on on the speed of the data not the amount and i think this is very crucial for us uh because it it allows that what we are doing by by by by online and it's uh it's not a question of money for our students and this 93 percent means 100 megabyte broadband so we have really good coverage there's of course remote areas there are there's difficulties with the broadband and also in in some cases with the mobile so this this is more than 99.5 and it's approximately 100 percent and also our government not the current one but the last make that the access to broadband is a legal right so so therefore we are this is one of the top priorities and also explains that what we are doing and and how it's how we can do certain things next slide please those of you who have uh followed what's happening in in europe in member states with this vocational education and training we have had a very huge reform in a couple of years ago uh this law has been on on place now uh from january 2018 so this is the third year that we are implementing in kit uh what is notable that there's one part and and uh there's different versatile learning environments and uh in the middle there's just missing skills are acquired so what we are offering that we just have to recognize and and really work that what what is the prior learnings the students have when they are entering our wet schools and only the missing parts are learned in the in the wet school we had two very different laws concerning vocational education and training one for the initial wet one for the continued wet and as you know it's very hard to shift the paradigm especially if you have to make the change in your own head and and therefore i think we are we are still amid the implementation process because if you have been a teacher of 25 years with different principles and now you have been in in this new scenario two and a half year it's not very easy to work all the time aligning with this new new law and also something that i like to point out on the on the right hand side of the presentation that the goal is not the graduation but uh employment or access to the higher education so we have this personal development plan and it have its goal has to be what's happening after graduation and the next one please um some of them i also told all wet is in not one law so we have a very merge system and and let's say very flexible system uh in in provision of wet in a provider level we have this uh these national core curriculas for for each subjects but we have a very strong autonomy on the regional level that and there is much flexibility how we make our provision of vocational education and training on the area based on the needs what are on the area and there is no distinction between schools based and work based learning and as i mentioned earlier this personal competence development plan is made for each students when the students start the studies and it's updated regularly during the studies and the last update is just before graduation that what are the future plans after the graduation and also not any more distinction between continuous wet and i wet in in a system level of course there is a difference that how you provide education that if the students are 16 or 17 year young students or other student of course the pedagogy is is is different and also that we don't see any any difference on the there is no dual system but the apprenticeship training is included on on the wet and it's included in the work based learning and also assessment assessment in real working situation it's something that uh is if there's any exceptions they are mainly that uh let's say if there's a course in english that it's not so easy to make the assessment in real working situation and and then there can be a test on the school but uh all the professional courses and modules requires that the assessment happens in the real working situations uh next one please as i mentioned i i raise up two different examples first one is e-campus in Finnish language the campus is written with the k and and not not the letter c so if you if you google this uh merkurian e-campus it's it's a little bit different form of writing and also what what's the digital tutoring and as i mentioned earlier uh pedagogical principles and rules and decisions are the drivers not the applications that are used and also uh i'd like to note that uh what is the typical of wet teacher there's three prerequisites to be a wet teacher teacher must hold an at least bachelor level degree on the field that uh uh a oc teach and uh and for example in one field in social and health care there must be a master level degree also teacher must have uh pass uh pedagogical studies of one year meaning 60 credits and the third is that the teacher must have three years working experience prior entering on the on the wet school so the things uh as i mentioned that what's happening in a Finnish vocational education and training uh what is this uh access to internet and what's happening also we have uh i can say very high quality wet teachers in in Finland and next one please now we are entering the first example Merkuria is a business wet school in the Helsinki region and uh this is something that they stopped it i think it was uh three or four years ago that they have this three kind of campuses they have this physical campus this wet school campus they have working life campus and they have e-campus as the name tells us working life campus is concentrating on work based learning what's happening on the on the companies including the apprentice training and also all the projects erasmus projects and other projects uh which have a very strong connection on the working life and and if the students are are included there it's it's there so those are these three pillars how they are doing and this physical campus this wet school and e-campus uh they are in practice they are very much overlapping in in wet schools campus you have this in real life services guidance face to face kurato student health services uh but how student enroll or study course and models have the very same procedures teachers are also able to handle the hybrid model meaning that part of the students can be present on the campus and rest participate online and and for students it's very easy to jump between campuses especially with this e-campus and and and a wet school physical campus and also what they have done in mercuria that is copyright that all teaching material uh belong to mercuria so all the material is available for for all they have one portal to log in all courses courses are available in in the same format video chat is included and sessions can be saved for the later learning and listening like this one uh pedagogical idea behind this campus is that e-campus can and must be inspirational easy to reach uh and learning should be fun they they even mentioned that that learning must be fun of course there's these goals that gradually is and and entering work in life uh the courses are offered by the very same base structure starting with introduction ending with assessment guidance is included and uh it is either online or or chat base all courses have goals possible recognition earlier uh possible recognition of earlier learning what is the learning material what tasks should be done on the course what are the methods of assessments on on the course uh at the spring when covid hit europe and and finland you can imagine that the transfer to remote learning was not so hard task for the schools like mercuria which have it is so let's say quite an encouraging way of of offering education and now we can jump to the next one and and this is from my my own wet school and how our student counselors describe what they are doing meet the students be there where the students are in real life or digitally use applications uh that the students use and and uh i think it might be a little bit funny when i i saw saw you the next slide in in i i mentioned it a little bit earlier okay thank you uh may in in finnish student counselors are not only uh to guide students but they also promote wet in primary education that transfer they are the brits from the primary education to the secondary education so they are they are marketing and promoting but uh therefore some of the platforms that you've got the glimpse are for the guidance and and some of more to the uh marketing to wet and um what i'm shortly showing you is is based on the interview of our one of our study counselor it's an example and uh our story uh student counselor is not any kind of professional social media influencer but an average social media user and very active study counselor and now we can jump on the locals uh i think uh you knew all of them at least on the on the upper part of the page on the right hand sides uh on the on the middle there is this visma uh visma is a finnish company offering student administration services to student database and and everything uh in practice it it has a monopoly in primary education and and also very large markets here in secondary education and we our wet school is also using it uh so the visma has a very excellent coverage among our students and it can be used by smartphone applications uh when the student starts studies in our wet school they have expertise of using visma products for several years i i put the lower part in the box there are something that are still used and i i included teams on that too it's something that we are still calling students we are still sending sms to students and sending emails and uh at the spring times uh when there was this lockdown in finland we also in in cases used the teams and it was easier it was it is used on our wet school and uh student just uploaded to application and uh teacher can invite them on the sessions all these commercial applications that uh you can see there are also used by our student councilor this councilor told that she got contact from uh daily from each of these different social media platforms and and i was surprised that she was using such so many of these uh different platforms for for for guidance and and in her job uh and i was surprised that uh in in which words our our young students lives because it all that uh there are several good points to use actively these so many social media platforms uh students can follow her where she is and know when she's busy that okay now she's visiting this and that uh primary school she's not on the school and they can uh contact her later also active presence in social media lowers the bar to contact in real life and it was a little bit surprised for me but it it works on on on that way uh different platforms also offer different approaches for for example what's up fold and video chats with several uh participants are excellent for interactive communication updates to instagram facebook and snapshots are for daily activities for her and uh i was not very sure that um is is anybody looking for them and then she mentioned that uh yes there is a there's a quite a much followers she had got 40 000 views in her video in tiktok and and now we are talking about uh provis regional web provider and one individual student councilor 40 000 views and now uh summary of of this tutoring and and guidance is that be there where the students are use the tools that uh and and platforms they are using have an easy access to the contacts on online and in real life thank you for your attention thank you matty um very interesting um i i particularly i would ask a question that i would like to make which is about uh this guidance this particular point of making learners a person and not a number so you you you you you you work personally with each one of them which is um uh something that uh is very difficult to do online but it's necessary um do you have an idea of how much time uh the tutor spend with this guidance and how do you prepare them uh as i mentioned this personal development players which need this uh requires these uh meetings and uh the first one is typically uh at the beginning of the semester and they they are really meeting each other but uh if there's in a couple of times there's also these prior meetings that before the study starts if there's any needs if you have uh uh students which specials needs you can contact and these contacts are typically made online and uh at the at the school's campus they are done uh physically and then what's happened there and there are several persons who can uh who can make these uh contacts the teachers are of course the ones who are making what's happened with the professional studies and and how well or poor the students are going and this guidance uh these student counselors are are working very near contact with the teachers that okay if there's anyone who is dropping out or or need maybe need some extra guidance and uh and and this particular study counselor told that uh uh she she had got only a couple of uh very annoying or irrelevant contacts on with these online uh social media platforms and mainly they are let's say they had that she told that uh our students are very responsible that they don't make a difference on meeting online or in real life so so for them it's contact and so so there is no difference for for many of them that how it's happened for for us as a middle age this is real or different but for for them it's just a way of contacting I see Kitos um I have to say one thing you know when we had the the the meetings face to face I used to measure the attention paid to the presentations by the number of fell asleep during the presentations and here what I noticed is that people didn't leave the session so I think that the presentations are very good all of them and I appreciate very much your effort Timothy was team was very busy last week with the Eden learning week as vice president and organizer so it was an extra expert for him for Alicia it was also an extra effort I didn't tell but with this lockdown she she couldn't reach the presentation so she had to do one at home so extra work thank you very much Alicia and Mati also thank you very much because it's the first time you use zoom so that's an extra expert also for you so I appreciate very much in the name of Eden and in the my personal name thank you very much to all and as usual I will clap thank you thank you thank you everybody thank you thank you and goodbye keep in touch okay bye bye and good learning and good that week now you have you have now some sessions live so good that week also thank you bye bye thank you