 Rhaid o wneud. Mae'n rai bod hi'n ffogol yn ystod ar gweithio, mae'n ffysg hyfforddiol. Rydyn yn ychydig i'r prif Weinidog ddod o'r gyflawn i ddiogelio'r gweithio. Mae'n rai o'r chinoedau. Gweithio'r plwy o'r ddwychiant o'r 3 cyfnodau wahanol, sydd y'n meddwl i'r meddyl iawn. Rydyn ni'n gwneud i'r holl ddweud o'r dweud, oherwydd i'r holl ddweud o'r holl ddweud, mae'r holl o'r holl o'r holl yn ddweud o'r holl ymylgrifedd o'r hollwch am yr hollwch a'r hollwch am yr hollwch, oherwydd i'r hollwch am yr hollwch am yr hollwch. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r hollwch am y cyfnodaeth the idea of learning space is also important. And of course the importance of thinking about social injustice and inclusivity in higher education and in the education system generally. You may know that I work quite a bit on the policy level, so my perspective on a lot of this will be really from a macro perspective, thinking more about how this is going to y system ym eich edrych, y cyfnod ar gyfer y cyfnod yma yn y ffordd. Rwy'n dechrau'n mynd i'w hwnnw i'ch eich profesi yn Y Nŵrgwyrrytio. Rwy'n dechrau'n ymwneud yma yw'r llyfrgell ffyrdd yma, ymwneud ymwneud yw'r llyfrgell ffyrdd. Rwy'n dechrau'n ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud. Rwy'n dechrau'n ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud Y Ciron UK. Y Ciron UK ym ymIK cei Amryl. Rwy'n dechrau'n ymwyneud ymweith o'r perlwn i'r lle sydd yn ardal, o dweud dwi'n sefydli 5 ym mwyn ymmer, a rwyf wedi allan 80 staff yn dda yn y ef, fel rwy'n dechrau'n teulu ymddangos cysunio'r nhw'n ymwyneud, how do, how can we support refugees to get into higher education? And how can we use digitalisation to support that? And I actually joined them earlier this year because I just thought, OK, I've been doing a lot of work on the top level, kind of talking about change, talking about the things we want to have, I'd like to get more involved in actually doing it. And so that's why I'm at Ceyron and it's given me already great insights into some of the challenges of what we're calling wide open learning and I'll talk a bit about that at the end as well but firstly a picture of Fogg I've been living many many in Germany but I'm British very often when I go home I live very near to Wales and my thing is always to go out with my dad I go to a mountain bike park and I go mountain biking. Now the point is for me, I'm not interested in my mountain bike. In fact in this case it was a mountain bike that I hired. What I'm interested in is the experience of the mountain biking. I'm interested in the flow, I'm interested in the challenges and all of that. So I think we can take that a bit as an analogy to one way for us to think about education and how it's organised and all of these cool things including open education that we think about. So here's a list of things that I'm actually not really interested in. I'm not interested in open educational resources, not in interested in open education, not in artificial intelligence, digitalisation of education or open badges. Not in the first instance because I'm really interested in higher education. And I think we have major goals for higher education at the moment. I also think we can think much more expansively about what we mean with higher education and we'll come to that when we come to some of the pathways I want to present. But I think this is a list that we developed when we were thinking about what might the future of higher education look like. But in fact this is a list that applies I think in very, very many contexts. Although in our case it was particularly for the German context and also for the European context. But I think part of what we have to do at the moment in a situation where a lot of reform is happening in education we're talking a lot about the significance of higher education and lifelong learning for creating sustainable societies, societies able to cope with the huge change coming at us. Then these are the kind of key things I think which are part of what we've often called the university experience. But we've often seen as implicit parts of this experience. And I think now when we think of reforming and changing we have to make everything until now has been more kind of implicit ideas much more explicit because then we can check whether all the reforms all the ideas we've got are really helping or contributing for us to achieve those goals. So the study programmes need to reflect and to reflect to developments in society. This is of course why we see such a focus on higher education and lifelong learning at the moment. I was in the German federal ministry two days ago and we were talking about possible changes to the study aid programme. And the representative for the ministry was saying, you know, forget about investments in innovation in companies. Forget about thinking about how we're going to support people getting housing. Let's really, really focus everything on developing skills and competencies in society because this is the key to sustainability. And so our idea really of higher education is that this means for us not just giving skills but enabling people to reflect on those skills, be critical about society but also to think about what future reforms they would like to have in society. So I think again that the education experience in higher education should be about maybe even kind of practicing social reform so that the graduates can go out and actually enact this in the future as well. And I mentioned already a very key thing which is I think we have to think also more expansively about learning spaces. This is something I'm particularly directing at higher education when you see a lot of discussions at the moment about how higher education should be changing. One of the big things is, yeah, there's these great kind of fab labs, we need fab labs on campus. We don't need fab labs on campus. We need to connect to the fab labs that exist in the community. We need to open higher education. That's really more about it. So higher education shouldn't be this kind of enclave. It should be a place which is always reaching out and bringing people in. And when we think about bringing in, it's very important to know that the day before yesterday was world access to higher education day. This is done by a friend and colleague of mine from the UK. But it's a hugely global initiative now. On that day there were many, many tweets from right across the world from universities, from groups of students or people in the community making efforts to try and make higher education more inclusive. This is because it's a challenge in every single country of the world. Sometimes we just think, oh, it's just our country. So Germany, for example, we know we've got a huge challenge there. But our challenge is, let's say, different to countries like, let's say, the UK, where because on the first instant one would say, okay, Germany, we don't have tuition fees. We don't have tuition fees, but we have other forms of selection, which is creating a rather exclusive higher education experience. So we need to think about this. And that's why I think we need to kind of re-look at higher education. And that's what I'm going to present to you. And then we can come back to the thing about, okay, what about open education? What role can it actually play? So a number of years ago I was asked by the UNESCO Global Education Report to prepare a background report on indicators for the new sustainable development goal for which was also related to higher education, which is either 4.3 or 4.4. And one of the things it says in that goal is that there should be access to high quality learning, including in universities, for all. And one of the things we were thinking in the group when we were working on this is what does this for all really mean? And then we kind of got more to this kind of traditional idea. Yes, chances and opportunities for all, but there can still be some kind of selection. So I actually propose now on reflection and thinking over the last couple of years about all the projects I've been doing and people I've been meeting that I would actually like to totally reformulate this goal for sustainable development in education related to higher education. I think it helps hugely if we start from this perspective, which is why don't we just say, let's assume everybody we see will some point in their lifetime take part in higher education. This I think is a huge change in perspective. Instead of the thing which I've been also working on many years, which is okay, we see their selection. Who are the people who are not being included in higher education and how can we support this group? So I would like to change it the other way round, say let's just assume everyone is going to come to higher education. That means then we have to think about, okay, so that means some people will be older. Many people will have very, very heterogeneous learning biographies. So we have to think how we can support that. People will not be able to study full time. How can we support that? So this kind of change in perspective I think is quite helpful. And now we come to some of the ideas we developed within the study we did for the German government. And I think it's really true that very often when we're thinking of higher education, we're thinking of a kind of a closed ecosystem. Now very often the closed ecosystem will be the campus. And many people who are, for example, against digitalisation will be saying, okay, but we need the campus experience. So they're thinking of this kind of closed ecosystem where everything is controlled, the student needs support, etc. But it's all within a particular place. If you look at the worst iterations of digital learning, it's the same idea. Only in that case the ecosystem is the learning platform and the interaction of the student through their computer, through their laptop. So that's why I think it's really important to think about how higher education is organised and also maybe to change perspective from the student. This is a great photo, I think it was from 1980s for first forms of digitalisation. In many universities it might not look like this, but it feels like this I think to the students for sure. And often that's the way we organise higher education. Now the interesting thing is let's take more of a perspective from what it's really like for students. This picture on the left, this is quite interesting. I was stuck one time on a journey through Germany and I had a longer stop than planned in Mannheim. And sometimes I just think it's just kind of fun to go and visit a university. So I went to this university and just tried to find a place also where I could sit down and work. And so I was sitting here and I realised above this room on the left was an auditorium where a lecture was going on. In the lecture there were about 20 people sitting really spread out in the room. Nobody really paying attention. In this learning space all around the lockers were students working together in small little groups, working collaboratively on their learning, on their university experience as it were. So I think that's one really important point. And we can see for example this is a picture I was very recently at the University of Cyprus. They have a new library and we see at the moment this kind of re-emergence of libraries as centres of learning. And they've spent a lot of resources and money as well on making this fantastic library. But it's full of people working, full of people studying. And they've also said this is not open just for students but it's open for the whole community. So I think this is something about these learning spaces. So another thing. What about what we really think about how students are actually living? So for about 10 years from 2005 to 2015 I was the international coordinator of a big study where every three years we did a survey of students in 30 countries in Europe to find out about where the students came from but also how they were spending their time, where their money came from, what they were studying. So we tried to kind of understand almost the socio-demographics around their studies. So the latest figures show us that 51% of students in Europe work alongside their studies. The other thing they say and this is really interesting is we set up this one question which is to ask students do you feel primarily like a student who works alongside their studies or primarily like somebody who's working and is studying alongside their work? And you can see here how this change happens, the older somebody is. And I think this is really important for us to consider as well this kind of way students are perceiving their identity as a student. So you see the older the student is the more they're saying yes I really really want to study it's really important to me but it's only one thing in my life and many times also on a policy level and this was one of the slides we discussed two days ago at the federal ministry on that kind of level people don't think like that because they think of course the student is studying full time and their full concentration is on their study. That can only be possible for one group of students so when we start thinking of trying to be more expansive trying to offer more learning opportunities we have to be realistic about how students are living as well. Another thing is and you may have seen this because or this idea because it's become popular over the last year this idea of the 100 year career and when you start thinking like that then you think about how might learning happen within that? Now our general idea of education is it's kind of like a one way track you get on this track and at some point you exit it and you never go back. Now I actually promised my daughter that I wouldn't tell another anecdote about her but unfortunately and she knows I don't think this is good she thinks she's at the end of this track as well so she's 24 she's done her bachelor master now she's working she's like okay I never have to learn again. That's not true but our education system is planned as if it were true and this is really a problem you know and I really don't think it's helpful at the moment where we make this split between higher education and further education it's much more fuzzy than that and especially if we're going to be more inclusive. This is just something funny I saw the other day I'm part of one of these European University consortiums and this is at the University of Exeter no Essex in the UK which to be fair is a very very inclusive university but they have this funny sign just near the guest house and I actually happen to know what a ha ha is which is this kind of funny gap here but I just really like the actual text here which says we don't take any responsibility for injuries resulting from play activities and I thought maybe that's also the kind of thing of the way we see formal education it's like no this is serious don't play around you know get your studies done so I think this is the whole thing about we have to think much more about these open learning spaces where we can experiment because experimenting is part of higher education I think and then I also think it's nice I've been following Ron Barnett for a long time in his many studies always rethinking the place of higher education and university education within today's society and I found this interesting because I really think some of his earlier books were really focused a bit on the research university he then also had a book which I think was called the entrepreneurial university but now this idea of what he's calling the ecological university I think this is really the interesting one which is the university for others so again it's this idea of an open university which is for the community so then one of the topics I've been working on in the last few years is also thinking about digitalisation and how that might help us to open up spaces and of course when we're thinking of digitalisation then that helps us build up networks communication and it helps us to build it in such a way that we can use that for these new learning spaces but we know for sure in every country I know probably better in Germany but I know for sure in most of Europe at least and these opportunities are not being taken up by the universities when we did this study on the future of higher education and I'll present some of the pathways in a second the kind of disappointing point for me was when we were looking for really cool initiatives or institutions which were doing this kind of thing they're always on the periphery of the formal system not in the centre of it and that's a bit of the point that we have to try and think about how we can move this right into the centre so now the four learning pathways now the thing about this four learning pathways idea is this was a study we were asked to do by the German government and the actual contract was or the commission was to look at how digitalisation would change higher education running up to 2030 and we're an international consortium and we particularly looked at changes in the work market or in the job market changes in technology itself changes in the didactics and the way we learn and then also obviously changes in the student body and quite early on in this study we went back to the ministry and we said this is not really going to be about digitalisation we think the key point is to think about the learner and let's look at everything from the perspective of the learner and this is where we came up with these four pathways which we think kind of sketch the higher education landscape moving up to 2030 but very important for us was not to do something which is kind of just in the future all of these ideas we developed we think they exist now but they're not systematic they're not kind of often they're not very big and they're not really supported in the way the normal higher education system is and I also did a study a number of years ago where we looked at in Europe different access routes into higher education and how they're organised and we also came up with four different types and we made the mistake of calling the types type 1, 2, 3 and 4 and every time when we were talking to other people about it we couldn't remember ourselves which were the types so we got round that this time by actually calling our different models by the names of toys so the first model and you saw a small instance of it right at the beginning is what we're calling Tamagogy and in a minute I'll present them a little bit more in detail but the important thing about Tamagogy is not only this idea that it's a closed ecosystem but it's also this idea of this one block that I was talking about higher education is one block now this one block might be that you do a bachelor and leave but it might be you do a bachelor and then a masters or even a bachelor masters and a PhD but it's still this idea it's one block maybe you do something else later which we're calling further education but the system is not really interested in that when we take then the next model this is Jenga this is you know this game you'll see a picture of it in a minute you know this game where you build up towers the point of that idea is that what about if the first part of higher education was shorter and more focused but it already assumed you would be doing other bits later and it kind of planned them in the third one Lego is really what we've probably been talking about which is probably is quite disruptive it's just a question of can you support it in such a way that it's also inclusive and then Transformer is something that at least in Europe has been a huge thing over the last 20 years which is how can we open up higher education for adults for older people and the thing is we've done that but we normally treat them as soon as they get to the university as if they were 18 so I'm going to present each of these models a little bit in detail so the first one with Tamagogy the point about it is we still believe that there will be lots of changes there's lots of changes that can happen around the classic university model and the other thing is if we think because we always thought for each of these models about exactly these points of the job market, the didactics, technology and organisation then there is a strong argument for this kind of model particularly for young people who are going into higher education they need support at least at the beginning of their studies to be able to kind of as one would say become academic so you support them for self reflection you give them support in what kind of courses they should be doing and you support them didactically along the way but of course the whole time is this is pre-programmed in a certain way so in fact that's about the didactics now on the job market what we've noticed in the job market is the job market has been through a phase where they say I only want ready made fully fledged graduates so they have kind of promoted at least in part in Europe that people not only just do a bachelor but follow up with a masters and then they get to to the job market and then we still hear from the job market okay no these are not exactly the people I wanted but part of this idea still and the answer from higher education is yes but they've learnt what we call graduate attributes and that will also make them that will give them the skills which will help them not only work now but also adapt to changes in work in the next 10, 20 years on the labour market so there is an idea behind that but of course when we see changes and how technology has been used within this system it's always an add-on because the organisational structure is pretty much the same as it was before so that's the point can we actually break this out a little bit so in this is when we get to the Jenga model and this is the idea of it's quite a didactical model actually because it's the idea of maybe when we build this kind of tower which is what we first think is the course which is the bachelor course or the master course maybe we can rethink it and think that maybe not all of those elements in it are absolutely necessary we could take them out and say okay those kind of elements can be learnt through modules much later in life and maybe those modules will also be offered by different educational providers the interesting question here is what role could the university play within this and I think the university could play a key role because they could maybe even design the whole bachelor programme with the assumption that part of it won't be offered by them but they'll be still accrediting it so I think there is a role of this big idea that we had also in the what we call in the Tamagodgy model but making it more flexible and thinking much more about this thing that there are changes on the labour market which we can react to but at the same time this is maybe more inclusive for some students who feel yes I want to do I want to learn something in higher education but I want to know it's something I can use relatively quickly so this kind of only doing maybe a two year programme so in Europe we've got an expansion of two year programmes at the moment but it shouldn't be just the two year programme it should still be accompanied with a big kind of didactical and educational plan of what that pathway should be if we don't do that it still remains relatively socially selective and that's why when we get onto the next model that's why that's such a key element now this Lego idea is really this idea that what about if the student or the learner is completely in charge of what they do so they go out and they decide what they want to do this doesn't have to just be things online which I think was a little bit of this idea with the first kind of moot kite which is you sit at home and you just pick up pieces some of these phases that you could be learning they can be present phases you could be doing six months at a campus or it could be longer or shorter than that but the point is you are actually, you as the learner you are actually designing this learning pathway yourself now of course you need a lot of advice for that there's two elements you need you need a lot of advice for that and you also need a much more flexible system of recognition because that system has to be able to recognise all those pieces so they're really valuable to you as the learner and that's when things like open badges or micro-credentials can play a key role I think then we get to the final model the transformer model again this is something we see all the time in recent reports now which is we see this idea not only that we have to offer higher education to those who maybe have missed out earlier on but we also see this idea now that there's so much changing in the labour market people will definitely have to go back to university or go back to studies to learn more now the didactical challenge here and the one that absolutely hasn't been fulfilled is you've got two elements to this group the first element is it's a long time since they were at school so one point is they may have forgotten certain things they may be slightly out of practice how do you do tests and all these artifacts that we have in our educational system but the other thing is it could well be that the younger pupils are learning new things which these people haven't been able to learn so on the one hand you need to support this group a lot especially at the beginning phase of higher education on the other hand they're bringing masses of experience with them from families from communities from being in the labour market and all of that they want to see reflected in their studies this also will help them a lot because they need particularly to have something which they can use to get them jobs after their studies as well so they need to be able to kind of bring in this experience and again this is we've got this on a very small level at least in the Bologna process when we talk about accreditation of prior learning it's much much bigger than that it's firstly really recognising what people have done already and then kind of adapting the study programs and the learning models around that so on the one hand you need a lot of support at the beginning but you also need a lot of adaptation to the specific needs and specific interests and specific competencies of this group so then I just wanted to give you three small examples of things that I think are interesting in that context and I'm sorry I have to use Ciaran as well we have our own app now which we offer for our students we really are trying to offer what we're calling wide open learning through the digital platform that we have and we're focused as I said on refugees 7000 refugees on our learning platform they are learners originally this was as I said an initiative to support refugees who came to Germany and were having the problem that the universities wouldn't accept that these people had any kind of knowledge or competencies because in Germany we're quite bureaucratic it was the question okay can you prove that no I was fleeing and so we kind of stepped in then as Ciaran as a kind of bridging to say okay we'll take any of these refugees we'll support them in their learning and we'll have a partnership with these universities and say okay we can tell you they've been on our program for a year or so this is what they've learned and then we hope that the university will not only accept them but also maybe recognize some of the learning programmes to actually speed up their learning programmes and the big impetus behind this and the reason why this kind of got a lot of traction in Germany is because the biggest group of refugees we were getting in Germany were from Syria and everyone knew the Syrian education system is is pretty good so that's how it started this year we've made a lot of changes because we realized that our problem is the bottleneck is still the university because the university is still causing problems and we realize we're doing stuff that the university would like to do themselves anyway so we've spent the year now working on short programmes much more focused on what we think our learners need and want and we're just about to launch early next year then an open badge program where we can think of how can we offer these kind of alternative credentials for the students so on the other hand we still have the problem and that's something again we'll be working on next year which is how can you build a community around this digital learning piece because that's the key element we have come we focus really this year very much on the content side and now next year we need to focus more on the educational side to really make this much more valuable for our students but we have a lot of interaction with our students we do know it's empowering them it's helping them they find this very important and we do have students who go on then to study in German universities and are successful as well so this is one way you can think of being more flexible about what we mean by higher education because in our very first iteration we were called the Chiron University and then we got in big trouble that's why we're called higher education now but I think this kind of provision is actually very important and this is a bit to my point where I think on the phrase of the normal system this kind of development and Chiron is just one example is happening a lot and it's a question of can that be built or integrated better into the formal system as well talking of this whole thing of building communities and a digital learning platform we at Chiron we're involved in a project which was commissioned by the European Commission and it's called Eurasmas Plus Virtual Exchange and it's exactly focused on this point which is it's the idea that many people would like to have exchange you know the Eurasmas Programme as something which was which is very very successful also in promoting physical mobility within Europe particularly but it's very exclusive so even the European Benchmark for the physical mobility is 20% of graduates should have experienced physical mobility during their studies so that's a high number but it's what about the 80% I think what's happened here and this was again one of these things which started focusing really much more on okay what about if we're thinking of this mobility question outside of Europe this virtual exchange is super relevant also within Europe as well and I was discussing this a little bit last week with the European Commission and some of these ideas of at least blended learning will be built into the next program so you can see that even within the kind of the established system there are more ideas of trying to flexibilise learning and also make it more open to more people and the last example I wanted to give I mentioned already I'm Ciaran we're part of the the what's called the UFA Alliance Young Universities for Europe this was a big initiative from I think about two years ago where the European Commission said wouldn't it be great if we had European Universities as collaborations between universities and it's very interesting there are 17 alliances at the moment and suddenly actually within this context many many of the alliances are thinking really quite out of the box about how to organise studies so one of the things that we at Ciaran are particularly working on is what's being called the virtual campus and it should be a way of connecting students between all of the eight universities in fact it's more than that because we've just merged the official partners and the associate partners so all of the partners will be much more connected through the network so this is a way of us expanding in that way digitalisation these learning opportunities I just wanted to mention also another thing that's been mentioned a few times before open education for a better world which is the deadline has passed but I'm told that really really interesting submissions might still have a chance and the other thing I wanted to mention in connection to that is the leadership in open education programme which we're developing these kind of things are important because I'm really you can see very much about how I'm arguing I'm really interested in all of this stuff but only when we think about how do we really bring it into the mainstream and how do we use it to change the mainstream I really would like us not always to be on this edge piece so then I think we really can after all that then we can start thinking about all of these things like open education open educational resources artificial intelligence etc but I think it's really really important we know what the challenges are outside we know it's about changes in the job market changes to knowledge and the competency profiles that are expected of students, of learners of citizens in society we know there's a whole a lot of demographic changes happening and technology of course there's a lot of changes there but the most important thing is to think of all of that from the learner perspective however when we then kind of make a flip and think okay what does that all mean then I think the scheme that Rob, Martin Weller and I developed for what we called the OFAT study is a kind of helpful way to then think about okay what work is then to be done to try and think about how can we change the learning experience this goes back a little bit to this idea of unbundling but I'm really most keen to think of how this is all connected so very often when we're thinking of changes we often only think of certain parts of this whole kind of cake here which is of course one of the points is what is the access and the delivery of the learning opportunity this would be something where digital can play a huge role this is where we think of different access regulations to help students also get into university and then though because we know we've got then a diverse group an increasingly diverse group which we welcome then we also have to think about what kind of learning content support and what kind of didactics do we need to support that and of course the ideas of co-creation play I think a key role here because we shouldn't try and second guess things we can build the creation part into the educational process itself but we mustn't forget about the recognition and certification of knowledge and competencies and I'm also a little bit involved in kind of the open badge stuff and the open badge guys they say don't talk to me about content I'm not interested I'm only interested in my badges and I think it's really important that we always think about you know how do we bring this all together and that's really my point here is to really think how can we bring this all together how can we think about OER as a key element to all of these changes and to supporting our students but also think okay if we've got OER what are the other elements we need to make sure that that creates a comprehensive and coherent system for the learner which is useful for the learner after their studies as well thank you very much any questions okay we'll do it again thank you very much for a very insightful talk Dominique the four pathways I found that fascinating but they're all plastic or very rigid toys so I would challenge them I would like to have a conversation because we talk about flexibility and molding and I thought some play though would be lovely so maybe you can think about that so any questions from the audience okay Virginia hi Dominique nice nice talk my question is about the hacker education landscape in the world because I feel sometimes that when from the global north talk about hacker education institutions I often refer to their model of hacker education that is quite elitist very selective and hacker education is very different in each part of the world for example in Latin America hacker education has a more social and connected with the society model we don't have for example in my country we don't have selective process we have a lot of difficult to be inclusive because people that doesn't achieve secondary to finish secondary school for example and we have a lot of difficults for example in relation to social conditions for example an economy so how we can think in models that can take an account the different kinds of model of universities and I don't know for example how is the models in Asia for example or in Africa they are very different and have different missions so I think we have to think in different students also so thank you of course there's always difference still this model which we're calling tamagogy that's everywhere and that's part of it because once you when we were doing this study also the ministry said what about quality assurance how are you going to fund those different forms and we said let's leave all these governance questions later but I think the huge expansion we've had in higher education across the world particularly in the last 20 years has been driven by one idea of one model and has been accompanied by a certain form of governance which in the end has led to a lot of bureaucracy which has limited the chances within higher education to experiment particularly with teaching and learning so there are you're quite right of course you can always find really great initiatives but not on a kind of systematic scale and I think we still must really be serious about the fact that higher education is absolutely exclusive everywhere you can go to Latvia no sorry Lithuania and 74% of people in the cohort go to higher education but half of those are paying for their studies and the other half are paying nothing so we've got all the system is always built in a very exclusive way so we have so we have to kind of tackle these bigger things first but I think of course when we start thinking of you know how do you actually implement or how do you actually change then you have to go to the real context and think about how can you build it around the real context and interest but you know the other thing is there hasn't been enough focus in higher education on teaching and learning in the last 20 years either because everyone was focused on research and expanding numbers of students so the challenge is there but of course there are differences within and between countries and when we I've just been in West Africa very recently and in West Africa you know it's a bit irrelevant what the universities do because it's only 3% of a cohort to go to the university so when we then think about what we want to do we have to totally think outside of model so I think part of our problem in development in every country has been we're too focused on what we think the formal system should be like and it's normally based on a legacy from before and you can for sure as you say see historical legacies within different higher education systems which make them different but I think on this very high level it's still not flexible enough and that's why they're so exclusive thank you yes okay thank you first of thank you so much for so much inspirations in a so brief time actually but I am wondering if universities nowadays are enough vital for rethinking their self in a jenga lego seto transformis model or if this transformation has to come from outside for example are universities the best social subject for developing a new mode for evaluating competencies I'm not sure what do you think about it I think this is really to my point that I really think over the last 20 years through expansion we've developed a whole load of things which are really just artifacts which we can question and you know we've a lot of it has been to cope with expansion so really I mean I understand the perspective from the university leadership as well and also from policy which is you know let's try and keep it simple so we can keep the expansion working properly but I think now it's time to rethink all of these things properly and I really think it's disappointing if we see that the only really interesting things are happening at the peripheral outside of the formal system and that's the most disappointing piece I think because if you ask what to see the kind of common understanding of a university of itself it says it's experimental it's always thinking of its place in society but it's been a bit lazy over the last 20 years on this thing I think so I think that's why we have to rethink that and that's why it's really great that you know people like us have the opportunity and we see now there is a change I think where on a strategic level there's more openness for quite a few of these things but then we have to start playing the game of realising how do we sell cool ideas to a mainstream system and that's a huge challenge I think Thank you very much for a very interesting talk and interesting analogy I've been thinking in the similar line and come to the conclusion that in order to really make that happen and possible the learners individual have to own their own learning and data and if we are all institutionally oriented and thinking in terms of institution institutional framework you mentioned that the ecosystem stocking ecosystem of institution but how can actually make that individual at the centre and the owner of the learning that would be ideal but there's not much incentive for industry and not much incentive for probably individual government in a sense because it will become less control of all do you think that's really possible or do you think that would be the direction we should actually work towards So I think to your point the thing I'm worried about is if we say you know and this is a bit of the ego model if you just say okay it's really up to the learner they kind of put it all together themselves then you're expecting an awful lot of that person to be able to do it and it becomes socially selective for sure because some people come from a group where they can ask their friends and their parents another group no one around them has got any experience of that so then you have to think about okay well what kind of support could be given on another level I think really it's a lot to do with the fact that I think universities can pick this up and it has been interesting for me to see what has happened with this university this European University initiative because it's kind of forced the universities to think about okay what would it be like to have teaching and learning if you're not one institution but eight and you're all doing it together and somehow that's already opened up some of these questions key to us anyway so because we know this kind of collaborative thinking can be helpful so it's been interesting to see that that happens I think there is a certain openness on the policy level as well but of course if you always think from the institutional perspective of a university of course they're firstly thinking right have I got enough money to do this how am I going to keep my staff we know in many many countries at the moment academics are having a more and more precarious career so it's difficult to build them to bring them into something where they're supposed to be more kind of experimental and expensive so we've got huge problems here but this is why I think part of the solution is to not just think of this as higher education on its own but think of really how can we have a good education provision throughout somebody's lifespan and then when you start thinking like that then there's a lot of things but they're just not connected and there's a lot of you know there's a lot of government bodies or support systems for the individual pieces but they never really thought from the perspective of the student they never thought systematically they just thought from the perspective okay I'm representing this sector or this issue or unemployed people and that's part of the problem so somehow we need a new bigger perspective but maybe I don't know maybe there seems to be a certain openness on the policy level for that I think and maybe I mean if we work more on you know monitoring and evidence that we can use for that that helps so this this has been for sure I was very surprised with this study because it's been very welcomed by the German ministry and Germany I don't know what you guys think of Germany but Germany is not a leader in innovation, no way Germany is good at doing the next bit but new ideas don't tend to come from Germany and it was very interesting to see that they could really work with this idea so but of course for the policy level their next thing is okay this is all very cool which bit are we as policy responsible for but that's then the next piece but yeah so we need this it's not enough to leave it to the student I think but having the student perspective is should be key to policy as well thank you very much interesting what you say about the Germans the Germans always say fforsprung durch technik yeah durch technik nicht durch innovations one more question but there's coffee also waiting I know then the conversation is really interesting thank you very much for your nice presentation that the Tamagochi sounds very familiar to me my organization Asuka academy is now planning to issue open badges to those who completed our courses translated in Japanese and in that sense I would like to ask you what are the benefits and the challenges of open badges to be useful this oil field thank you yeah that's maybe a nice thing to finish on because I think this connection is really important with the open badges we've just just I think two days ago we released an English language study that we've done in Germany on discussions we had about open badges in the German setting and we've also sketched their three different scenarios for how you can use badges I don't think it's useful to have badges which just replicate what you get anyway on your certificate and that's the kind of thing that makes everyone nervous because they think okay but this is this bad thing is kind of but if you if I think badges and badges is a terrible name it's just a digital format of documentation which is highly standardized and enables you to make lots of links to lots of other things which you can never do on a piece of paper that's what's cool about the badge but the nice thing is also that you can be slightly more flexible so the badge I think is really important for the kind of what I was calling the bits of the university experience which tend not to be replicated in your transcript of records or your certificate and that is really important for the learner I think is that gives them something super useful for when they leave college as well great initiative thank you very much okay thank you so much