 It's now my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker for today, Andrea Inamorato. Andrea is an international researcher, lecturer, public speaker, and consultant in digital education. She has over 25 years experience in teaching and research in education, working internationally with institutions in Latin America, Europe, the USA, and Africa. She holds a PhD in educational technologies from the Open University of the United Kingdom. Currently, she works as a scientific officer at the European Commission Joint Research Centre. Her main projects are the Open EDU framework for open education, the DigComp EDU framework for the digital competence of educators, and her research on blockchain in education. Please welcome Andrea to the stage to talk about Educating for the Future, the transformative power of openness. Thank you very much, Marie, for the kind introduction. Good morning, everyone. Excellent. I see everybody has had breakfast today. Excellent. Welcome to day two. Welcome to this morning session. It's really wonderful to see so many people around. You've got such a good energy. I hope you can exchange some of this nice energy today. So, as introduced by Marie, I am a researcher mostly in education and educational technology, and I hope that we'll be able to reflect together upon education, educational technology, and our roles, knowing and trying to push the education for the future and the future of education. So, I would like to start by telling you a tale, a short story. I think that many of you may know the story of the six blind men and the elephant. I can see some people nodding. They know. Fantastic. I think it's a very inspiring story. It's a story about six blind men who lived in a small village in India, and they were all discussing what an elephant would look like. So, each one of them had their own theories about it. Until one day, the gardener of the village, who looked after the garden of the palace, told them, look, why don't you come over and I will show you an elephant. We have an elephant there. So, you can have a look. You can have a look. You can touch it because they couldn't see anything. They were blind, and you can have a better idea of what an elephant is like. And they said, great, let's go there. So, they went there, and each one of them had the opportunity to get close to the elephant and to touch the elephant, no? So, the first one touched the side of the elephant, and he said, oh, it's very solid. It looks like a wall, you know? So, an elephant must be like a wall. The second one approached the elephant and touched the limber trunk of the elephant, and he said, oh, that feels strange. It feels like a snake. So, an elephant must be like a snake. The third one approached the elephant, touched the elephant on the pointed tusk, no? And said, oh, this is very sharp. This is very strange. It feels like a weapon of some sort. Okay, an elephant must be like a weapon. Okay, then the fourth man approached the elephant and touched the ear and said, hmm, this is strange. This is big, you know? It's kind of okay. It must be a fan. So, that was the idea. The fifth one touched the leg and said, wow, it looks like a big cow. To me, an elephant is like a big cow. And finally, the last one touched the tail of the elephant and felt it felt it like a rope and said an elephant must be like a rope. So, each one of them had this different idea of the elephant, and then they started arguing again in the garden of the palace what an elephant was like. Then the raja, the prince, woke up. He was having a nap. He woke up and said, hey, come on, stop arguing. You're just walking me up. An elephant is none of those things. It's all of those things together because you have only touched the single part of the elephant, right? So, I think this short tail illustrates a little bit. And I really want to use it as a metaphor today throughout my talk about what happens when we get too close to what we are doing, no? And what happens to when we step out a little bit and see things from a distance, no? So, we in education as practitioners, all of us have a different role. We are teachers, we are developers. Some of us are students. Some are headmasters, researchers. We all have our beautiful roles of playing in education, and we are very close to it, no? But when we step out a little bit and see the magnitude of the elephant, no? The magnitude of what we are doing, then we have a better understanding of our individual role in the future of education, right? So, I invite you to come through this journey with me. And here again, here, the proper elephant, no? Just have a look at it, and then try to imagine what would be the feel to touch the elephant, to feel it's warmth as a living being. Sure. And so, I think this gives us an idea of how different it may be when we are very close, you know, the sensations, the emotions. Let's think about the feelings that we have towards what we do, towards education, no? And then when we step out a little bit, how we can perceive it from a distance, right? So, this is the invitation I make you to reflect with me. Okay, so now, talking about the future of education, the future, no? To me, both things converge together, obviously, but there is a slight difference in my conceptions. It's my way of looking at the elephant, okay? I'm sure you all have your own way, and it's fine. But, let's think, the future of education for me is ever more technological, and it's fantastic, no? It involves virtual reality, augmented reality, algorithms, artificial intelligence, learning platforms, immersive platforms of all sorts, and this is fantastic. I've been working in the field of distance education for over 20 years, and I remember when people were very reluctant to accept, you know, in learning, online learning, I remember once giving a talk somewhere in which the pedagogy students were in front of the main entrance of the building protesting against the event on distance education. And it could never be quality education. Luckily, we have overcome that, or we are about to overcome that and fully embrace and accept technologies of all sorts in education. Although we know that we need to focus not only on the technology, but also on the pedagogy, the pedagogical side on how we teach and how we engage the students, and that's also very important, no? So the future of education for me is really a future towards the good of the technology to help us engage students in a different way with the world we live in. However, educating for the future, in my perception, goes a little beyond that. It goes beyond technology. It's really about thinking of how, you know, we plan education in such a way that it will be preparing those students personally in their own well-being, their understanding of themselves and of the world around them, but also how they can have an impact in the society, because as Margin said yesterday, we are all connected, no? There is always this flow between us. So it's the idea of getting close to the elephant, no? What we do with our technologies, with our LMSs, with our codes, and stepping out, and see how it can be a driving force for change. And that type of change, we name transformative innovation. It's not just any innovation, it's just not a new piece of innovation. It's some sort of innovation that can actually provoke change at a societal level that is much deeper, no, than small changes, and we all can contribute to that. So, my invitation is also, is for us to think today centrally in the student, having the student at the center, and also ourselves. We're thinking of ourselves as important actors in this change, in what we do. So you can perhaps think of each one of those in the photographs you could be there as well. It doesn't matter the age, it doesn't matter where we come from, if we are young students, if we are lifelong learners, everybody's invited in this journey. By the way, most of what we'll talk about today is going to be European centered, I'm actually Brazilian, Spanish Brazilian, in case you're wondering about my accent. But I work for the European Commission, so most of what I'm going to show you today relates to Europe, but I am sure, absolutely sure, that these challenges can apply to other parts of the world. So I also ask you to reflect what it would look like in your own context, because I know you're very diverse here. How many of you are from Latin America? Is that anyone from Latin America? Okay, brilliant. Okay, from the north, United States, Canada. Okay, fantastic. Okay, Europe? Probably the majority, because it's very important. Okay, so it's good. So we're going to be talking mostly about Europe. Australia, New Zealand, fantastic. Welcome everyone. So please, let's try and think about our own contexts as well. Okay, so I propose a three-fold perspective to treating the theme education for the future, right? The first one is our perspective. It's really talking about this post-industrial digital society that we live in nowadays. Yesterday Martin talked about the evolutionary aspect, know of the human being. So today we're going to talk about a little bit of this evolution in terms of how we relate to each other in society, which is absolutely important when we're talking about learning and we're talking about impact of what we do. Whether we are close to the elephant or whether we are from far away in thinking of education more globally. So then we're going to talk a little bit about societal challenges related to the twin transition. I don't know how many of you have heard of this word or this way of talking about the challenges, but in European policy, it's important now. Everywhere in all European documents you're going to look and see the twin transition and also a new concept that relates to that which is the triple transition. And finally, as promised in the title of my talk, we are going to talk about openness, open education and its transformative power. So I invite you now to get going for everyone who has a laptop or a mobile phone, please let's get hands on a little bit. Slido.com you can type that code 7440996 there are three questions there for you to answer and we are going to go back to see the results of those questions towards the end. Okay? So please have a look there let me know if it's working I hope it is, yeah? All the three questions, if not please shout and I'll try and fix it. But let's just quickly go there give your answer and we'll look at it. You know why? Because when we talk about open education it's such a broad term everyone has a different understanding I assure you that you're not going to have the same answer depending on who you ask you can try it yourself later on so let's see what comes up using one or two words whether open educational practices which are the open educational practices OEP you're most familiar with and whether you know what smart specialization is about thank you meanwhile we'll move on so we'll start with the first one individualism and collectivism what I like to call tribalism but you see I've put some words in there below but don't take them as negative words and I can easily understand complexity and chaos as something negative but I just want to show you how we can look at them and the power of transformation that they have so you're going to talk a little bit about complexity chaos authority individualism, otherness and tribalism as some of the characteristics of the post-industrial society the society living nowadays the sensations in which our students are embedded on a daily basis and we as educators have to live with that ok, contemporary society nowadays we have more choices do you realize that apparently we make 25% more choices nowadays on a daily basis then we used to do back in the 80s can you imagine that we make more than 3500 choices a day it's a lot we have to choose absolutely everything just to give an example do you know that you can choose even in a hotel I don't know if you know that nowadays you can choose even the type of pillow that you're going to sleep with it's incredible you have a pillow menu in the hotels, have you seen that has anyone seen that if you are staying in this hotel by the way look around the room you will find a pillow menu to my surprise, I thought it was a joke when someone said that to me but it's true, we are making choices every time we have a trillion websites on the internet we really have to make a lot more choices because of technologies the fast-paced life that we have now so it's so much different from the past and it obviously requires energy it requires engagement mental energy and most of those choices are unconscious so we have a lot of choices I see my two-and-a-half year old son going to YouTube kids and scrolling through thousands of videos so quickly and I was thinking how does he make a choice but he has his favorites and they keep on thinking how is it going to impact his choice making in the future he's used to have so much and I'm sure that you can relate to that if you have kids complexity, complexity is not necessarily something bad the problem is that we try to avoid complexity but as we saw yesterday our bodies are complex no, we have here a complex system that works well together we have no choice society is getting ever more complex in every single way you can see it in politics, you can see it in history nowadays we have wars we have global warming we have all sorts of social problems, disasters we have to live it all not different from the past perhaps the pace of everything is much faster nowadays but we don't need to understand complexity as something unsolvable I keep on saying that complexity is solvable we just have to face it, understand it and try and live it with it in the best way possible because it's very likely that society will be very complex from now on and then there's chaos some people attribute the same to niche from chaos comes order I don't know how many of you have heard of that I like another saying that I used to listen to in the UK 20 years ago for there to be order there must first be chaos I find that very powerful because sometimes we perceive a situation as very difficult and when we immerse ourselves we can see some order come through or we attribute some order to it so I prefer to look at them in a positive way and then we have individualism and tribalism so let's think a little bit in terms of individualism what has changed society has changed in a number of ways before, we used to be told what to do for example, we were expected to get married in our 20s or so many of us, there was a tradition of following the profession of our parents for example or having a job for life those concepts are no longer valid we know that it's very difficult to hold a job for life so we have to keep on re-skilling up-skilling reinventing ourselves to follow through social changes so I think this is interesting because this authority was given by institutions religion institutions sometimes or the state now it doesn't really quite hold in the society we live in we are more capable of making our own choices and we become with that more individualists it's just a consequence of that, right? it's not necessarily a bad thing but what does it mean? it means that we have to make more decisions all the time on top of the things that we choose happy with them so whatever the difference here is from authority to otherness this is the change in the post-industrial society this otherness means the different something that is not given to us as a standard so the social order has changed a little bit for example everybody now can choose much more freely their sexual orientation women can vote they can go to work and as we saw yesterday because of that and because of education birth rates have been falling right? so there is so much more now that we can do and we do not live anymore on that society that was controlled for us of course some people thrive with that others are very scared there are so many people that prefer that others make the choices for them perhaps we have students like that and these are the people that we have to help most navigate this new social order with less anxiety ok now individualism here everybody likes to be treated as individuals we can choose the type of Nespresso cafe we want to choose Ristretto there are thousands of options absolutely everything all the time what we buy, how we dress how we get into a plane before specific types of clothes for getting into a plane for getting into a party it's much more free nowadays individualism now let's look at the other part of it which is the collectivism or what I call tribalism it's our desire our profound desire to get together to find our niche to find our people the ones that we relate to intellectually no? to do through a sport or our people we have the desire to belong so it has to do with belonging and it's normal but if you see it's kind of a paradox in relation to individualism so we leave that paradox daily the individualism versus the need to find our tribe right ok but that comes the algorithms and I just wanted to make a brief note on that I think social media is excellent it's excellent that we can use social media in education I think long it's gone the time in which educators would tell students switch off your mobile phones or switch off your laptop during the classroom I don't want to see any of that I think slowly, little by little we have been learning how to use technologies to the benefit of education and it's fantastic but when you talk about digital competence it's not only about knowing how to use the technology but using the technology in a responsible way and understanding the impact it has on others and in ourselves so when it comes to algorithms although it's fantastic because it helps us make meaningful choices it makes our lives easier we all know here that for example the more you give a like on Facebook on some sort of post the more you're going to see the same sort of post no? so there is this repetitive pattern that this artificial intelligence understands that it's our liking what we would like to see therefore it starts pushing towards us always the same type of content and I think this is where us as developers, as educators as headmasters, as students we have to be very aware of that so that's the other part that's seeing the elephant at a distance looking at the hole what does it cause? normally people that are living in silos or they think they are right because everything they see is about the same thing so they think everybody agrees with them and when they see a contradictory idea what do they do? normally they reject we have populism we have so many problems in politics there are so many arguments in society people that hold different points of view and they are unable really to step back step away and look at them on a more critical perspective so what I'm here saying today is that our role is also to think critically and to try and engage the students in this more type of critical thinking because it's also part of digital competence right? ok, moving on let's look at the social challenges now I told you that I would give you assuming to European policy the European perspective on social challenges and here we go we talk a lot about twin transition the twin transition is the green and digital transition that we are planning now we are planning it at the policy level but you are also planning it with specific projects then we have skills jobs of the future when we talk about social challenges no, we need to prepare the workforce our students to face what society needs now and what society, the types of job that society will need in the near future universities have to reframe their syllabus what they teach, their courses, their master's courses they have to speed up and that's why we now have micro-credentials micro-masters, no and all those sorts of things that help the population re-skill and upskill and we have tools for that based on research policies and actual tools and I'll show you a little bit so the twin the green and digital are what we call the twin transition but then the third one the third transition is the social one and that's the one I'm talking about that's helping people think and that's where STEM subjects not only STEM, but STEM with an A for arts understood as arts and new managers become very important I can see through attending conferences reading papers and seeing new projects and reflecting that evermore we need the social transition we need people that are thinkers and they can people that can critically understand their use of technology how they use technology how they push it forward and can filter and understand everything that goes towards them so again, close to the elephant and they step back away from the elephant right? social transition is the third one so we've mentioned some of them climate change and adaptation it's not only about climate change we know that we need to adapt to the climate change also we need new products we need resilience we need an understanding of what's going on so that we can change our own practices individuals due to skills and competencies we have an ageing population so all that population that rising population that I've seen in the graphic yesterday is getting old and we have a problem there pensions, healthcare and we need to look at that right now clean energy, renewables clean hydrogen we need to prepare more people for that we need to transition our cars into cars that are electric and so many new jobs coming up but how quickly are universities adapting to it and do you really think that our generation understands the opportunities they have ahead because many of them complain not having jobs, not feeling very difficult to get into the market but maybe, maybe we're not really showing everything that is coming up right now steam approaches and European values European values has been identified as one of the main problems Europe faces right now there are many countries through populist movements that want to separate from Europe it's a tendency nowadays and what you want to do is to increase the sense of belonging the European tribe inside of the world in the sense of raising the sense of values what does it mean to be European it doesn't matter if Italian, Greek we are all Europeans and if you think further stepping away from the elephant in this room we are all global citizens we are part of the same planet now, very briefly I want to get into details but just for the ones who are interested there's a lot of literature on what I'm talking about the Edith Cohesion report talking about the main challenges Europe is suffering right now some of those I've mentioned just now the PRI playbook partnerships for regional innovation the biggest policy experiment ever in Europe that has been launched just a few months ago and it has the intention to involve all sorts of stakeholders so we are all here able to participate in one way or another it's not only for governments not only for education institutions but for NGOs, for individuals for students as well an open education is cited in there and the new era for Europe was launched just last week it talks about the triple transition the social aspect of the transitions we are going through ok, in terms of policies so we have studies at an European level I'm sure that in your continent you also find studies UNESCO carries out many studies that can help us understand society nowadays but in Europe we also have policies we have communications or recommendations to member states to understand the political scenario and to understand what drives for example funding European funding for many things that we do the European strategy for universities is was launched this year in February 2022 and one of the things it does is it calls upon universities to embrace their third mission we all know that universities have a kind of a triple mission which is research innovation through research education teaching but also the community side of things which is to spreading that to engage with the community to spread that knowledge and more than ever in Europe universities are being called upon to really materialize their third mission in very meaningful ways so engaging with this conversation between citizens and knowledge transfer for transformative innovation it is done via opening up we have the digital education action plan on the right hand side tackling the digital competence matter that I told you that we need more of that we have the microcredensions recommendation which is fantastic because it helps us create it will be possible to create learning pathways and have courses that are shorter that are more meaningful to design degrees from different universities or microcourses so we already have that in European policy and finally that one is the new innovation agenda for Europe so it's talk about deep tech it's very interesting in case you're thinking of you're engaged with technology and innovation I recommend you to have a look at these documents they are accessible, they are online and actually you're going to have the links to that in my presentation so you can just click in there and you see open education is also part of it in terms of the PRI playbook I told you it's the biggest policy experiment in Europe ever open education and open sciences there in one of the tools as one of the tools FISH 59 should you are interested so then we have these documents we have all these European documents that support policy and then finally we have research and my colleagues we are based in Seville in the south of Spain there in there we do education research for Europe and we come up from our research we always have to publish we have to make it available in the form of reports and in the form of frameworks so here we have the opening up education the European framework for open education in case you don't know what open education is about and in case for you it's about OERs only there is so much more to that so we tried to talk about it and explore it further computational thinking in compulsory education how can we bring that as a subject for young kids to start understanding computational thinking as a proper subject at school we studied how different countries present it in different ways and finally the digital competence of educators so it's all available and from these studies we create frameworks no frameworks they signal to us directions they provide a common language for us to talk about for example open education for us to talk about digital competence in the digital competence framework we are talking about empowering learners so it's not only about the technology it's about pedagogy empowering learners so and so forth I invite you to take a look at those as well right then from frameworks we also create tools technological tools trying to operationalize these frameworks bring it closer to people, to students, to teachers to developers so we created at an European level the selfie for teachers tool focusing on school education and here I'm talking really coming back to that metaphor to that analogy of the elephant we now have our hands on on the elephant because we're talking about the practical side of things getting close to what we are doing selfie for teachers if you go there as a teacher you can go through a self-reflection process to assess your digital competence as an educator if you're from higher education your tool is the checking one it's the one below if you click there you can reflect as well and finally once we propose this tools what we do sometimes is to analyze an entire institution you can ask all your teachers to use the checking tool if you are in higher education or the selfie for teachers tool and that will provide you with a picture of their digital competence and therefore ways for you to promote professional development activities for them right now we've carried down to this exercise in the entire country here in Spain it took us about four years to carry out from the beginning to the end from piloting and to results and a publication but it's published it's published now more than 5,000 lecturers here in Spain more than 53 universities participated in this study and gave us a nice picture of their digital competence and that has led to new policies you know so what is the Spanish ministry of universities going to do about this picture that we gave them in terms of digital competence of lecturers and there's a lot going on so it's policy feeding back into research feeding back into practice and that's a beautiful cycle and this is why I said in the beginning we have to be close but sometimes we have to step back to get the full picture and see how we can reposition ourselves within that bigger context this is what I just said know all these processes identification of needs research, policy, implementation and research again now the president of the European commission Ursula von der Leyen last week gave a talk on the state of union I don't know how many of you know that she from time to time gives a talk on the state of union and she talks about the most pressing issues in Europe right you know we are facing the war in Ukraine in order it takes all the sanctions there are so many things that has been happening in Europe directly but then she said 2023 will be the year of skills and that means a lot to us that means a lot to all of us all of us that are here today what can we do to help that this becomes true because we really need a population to be up skilled we have new jobs out there and we have many people unemployed jobs actually of positions because what we need is changing how well are we preparing people in terms of skills so just to give you a glimpse on the sorts of things that it's just a tiny snapshot of this whole area of jobs of the future and the future of jobs of future proof skills we say we need future proof skills skills that won't be obsolete because if you are very good at a software today and it has an upgrade tomorrow then it's kind of you're not good at it anymore you have to keep on going but there are certain skills that are future proof and those skills are related to humanities and arts it's your creativity entrepreneurship problem solving, critical thinking everything that help you navigate through that complexity that I told you in the beginning you can be absolutely fine with the complexity of society if you have developed yourself this type of skills now jobs of the future emerging jobs I said there I could give you a hundred jobs ethical hacker I think Martin mentioned the hacking he thought that every student should try and hack the systems of the universities no the ethical hacker or the metaverse architects we're already building the metaverse algorithmic transparency privacy officer how can we understand algorithms in the future data privacy strategist we already have data privacy officers but strategists how can we strategize privacy in data artificial intelligence educator people that help us navigate through our domestic robots learning robots so on and so forth and obviously everything comes at a price perhaps a metaverse psychologist for the ones who are from the humanities we keep on saying it would be nice to do things in the metaverse but the problem is when people get out of it and they have to face life again some will probably prefer to stay there but we have to help them out so when you talk about jobs of the future we really talk about all these things we do not know if it's going to be the case but likely it will be and then skills these skills we already know lifelong learning, autonomous learning needs to know where to look for information where to look for our MOOCs to our platforms our Moodle open source platform and all the open content that is in there most of the times not always it's OER but it can be an open educational resource fully licensed and we have to help people to be more aware of that and creativity so very briefly so we are talking about what when you talk about education for the future I told you from the beginning I see it as more technology based we are talking about digital content OER, artificial intelligence augmented reality, virtual reality and you name it you name it but then the how every more interoperable customizable that open ed tech mentioned yesterday seems to me a fantastic thing to do connecting all universities connecting all the content we have nice filters beautiful findability behind it beautiful pedagogy we cannot forget active methodologies challenge base, problem base project base, flipped classroom there are many learner centered blockchain technologies for micro credentials so we can enable different learning pathways no geographic boundaries and autonomous learners and now finally let's get to the last one openness I told you that I would like to focus on openness on the transformative power of openness I am indeed an open education advocate I have been following this field since 2006 and I am always amazed as to the power of openness look at this room model as an open source platform no you make it open here we are it's a beautiful community of engaging people always contributing with new codes, with new ideas and to me that's the key for connection let's have a look at this slide though let me see if I can shift here to show you the results the first one what is open education for you accessible that's the big one in the world then we have freedom accessibility which is different from access, thank you we have opportunity shared communication availability opportunity it's beautiful opportunity to learn equality shrek very creative which is so that's open education there is no single definition but we need the problem is because we don't like to engage with complexity normally we tend to think of open education in its simplest form MOOCs open licenses and perhaps open science but there is so much more to it open pedagogy recognition of formal learning so that you can have credits in different universities and that means being more open in many different ways a university can be open in different ways and so can you and my invitation today is exactly for you to think of what is your personal roadmap for connection for openness for tackling not only the elephant not only touching your hand the elephant for the practical things you do on a daily basis and see how from the perspective of societal change openness what you can do as an open learner as an open educator now we use that terminology the open educator so and so forth let's see the other one you can see MOOCs show results oh you haven't answered that one no oh I asked you if it was available sorry but anyway anyway so just for you to see I asked you which of the following open educational practices are you most familiar with quick hands up ah now what happened in there okay okay brilliant oh I'm surprised to see MOOCs winning from oh yeah recognition of no formal learning open science and there is so much more I didn't put more because there was no space to show you on screen but fantastic we can see here MOOCs because you probably develop the platforms or have to tackle the challenges of the platforms to offer MOOCs no and then the last one finally smart specialization strategies do you know what they are no no okay not sure okay I wouldn't expect you to know what smart specializations are really but I can tell you that it's in the same part of European policy very briefly speaking okay and you know that funding from the European Commission to the member states they are released every seven years right and then this funding is used in many different areas to build bridges to help hospitals to help students learn so every country decides how they are going to apply European funding right and just now we are closing the period from 2021 2027 for countries to present to the European Commission the proposals for the next seven years so that the Commission approves it and gives them funding right and one specific point is smart specialization strategies let's think smart specialization let's think of a region and let's think of what this region does best in the case of Andalusia where I live the economy is about tourism and agriculture so this is their strength so what are they going to do in the sense of strengthening even more what they are already good at to have that competitive advantage but also smart specialization the specialization in certain areas in a smart way but also identifying what they need to do to have an innovation leap so if they are falling behind for example I am just giving an example in services provision what are the actions that the government is going to take to bridge that gap so every country presents that presents that project and then they have to work for seven years applying the funding and also revising and revisiting the achievements they have made towards that so there is that mechanism behind but I keep on thinking can we use that in education so instead of releasing just any MOOC couldn't we be releasing the MOOCs that are totally related to our region place based innovation to help people from our communities to understand the challenges that we face on a daily basis and to help them interact in their community to make the place they live better couldn't we be releasing also a strategically MOOCs about climate change, climate adaptation all those things that we understand jobs of the future, skills, digital competence everything that we already know because it has been identified are challenges not only for Europe but perhaps for globally not for many parts of the world so to me this is about system change we are very close to the elephant we are developing the tools but if we step back how do we use those tools I think that's the other idea that's the point of putting these concepts together and step into complexity to understand it rather than running away from it because we don't want to spend any energy on that let me go back to finalize okay so, educating for the future okay so, just to finalize in conclusion why open education is so transformative why does it have this power of transformation because it fosters inclusion in every single sense it includes stop-down-and-button-up actions as I said each one of us can have our own openness agenda if you want to of course or less what can you make open it's not only about teaching how to make tortillas on youtube what else can you contribute positively to society that you think you can do so together with that fine grain of sand we can build the system change this transformative change so it can be done at an individual level it's a group level as an open learner, as an open education it can be the foundation for upskilling and re-skilling as we mentioned before in there it lies the power of transformative innovation and to me, I think that it's always a question of mindset change is to think differently to touch the elephant and to step back sometimes right, so I finalize with a quote that I like very much be the change you wish to see in the world thank you very very much for your attention thank you so much Andrea that was really fantastic you got me dreaming of using Moodle Next Gen to become a metaverse interior designer in the future for when I grow up maybe so we are now going to take some questions from the floor if you do have a question, put your hand up our mic runners, Adrian and Zoe will come to you so that we can give you a microphone so that everyone can hear your question so you are talking to a room full of technological evangelists how do we get everyone else to come across and put all these digital competencies into their day to day lives because we have to try and sell it to everyone else to try and build their digital skills so how do we talk to them thank you very much you are so right those changes do not take place from one day to another what I've shown you here today it's about years of research because open education, digital competence digital skills it's something that is very much fashionable nowadays particularly post-COVID but we've been researching and talking about it for years and finally we have that gap unfortunately through COVID but we have that gap of attention so yes, how do we get everyone involved in an individual champion really being an advocate where you are context-based place-based in your institution at home with your kids is starting from there because I've seen a lot changing from the bottom up institutions that are not considering opening up, open science open educational resources or MOOCs have really changed when they saw educational departments having specific actions experimenting with things they realize the power of that so change does not only take place from the top down I think that it's difficult but we can start within our own context that's what I believe I know it doesn't solve anything very quickly but it's a start Hi Andrea my question is somehow related to the other one which is how to bring this to life which is something which probably you want to share about the project and everything that's happening but also as you say about the individuals and probably here are a lot of individuals who really created open education so maybe you want to further access on what Europe is doing to encourage all of those policies to become life Yeah, thank you Open education is every policy what happens in policy priorities that it keeps changing what is policy priority today priority today may not be tomorrow suddenly the war in Ukraine came up and we had to put sanctions in Russia for example so that became policy priority and then we have to help refugees in terms of education to keep up with coming to Europe immigration so that became policy priority but there is work going on in open education since the communication 2013 communication on opening up education so what we can do is to feed open education into all those documents that I showed you because then we always have a window of opportunity when we bid for a project or when we need to justify to your institution, to whoever why you are going open you say well it's part of European policy and I can show you the paragraph of this important document that says blah blah blah blah so it may sound silly but in fact it's not it helps us to push the discourse forward right so we have open science featuring in this time working documents of the innovation agenda we have open education in the PRI playbook the biggest policy experiment and we keep on now embedding open education in mostly everything because we understand as open education to a way for innovation so watch out for future calls if you are in Europe because you can always think of making that connection between policy documents and not specialization open education technologies is sort of the ones that you work with right Hi, thank you for your interesting presentation my question is something that I see as a big gap in Europe is cross-wide recognition of certification for example for different skill sets so for example if I want to hire someone from Poland to do construction work are there any movements or any projects to try and standardize certifications and actually make them open online across Europe? Yes, I mean that has been going on for years it's so important what you are saying, thank you that has been going on for years and that's why we have the Bologna process but we still have so much to do about it so I think that the micro-predensions is a big leap forward but I would highlight one recent initiative from the European Commission called European universities I do not know how many of you know part of European universities very few of you but some so this is exactly trying to tackle this gap it's trying to put universities together from different countries I think each hub of an European university needs to have universities from six different countries brought together to create a degree together and to issue a joint degree so that's already a step forward in reducing bureaucracy let's say recognition of certification so they are trying testing out models the commission is pushing that forward providing funding universities are very much engaged with that reporting back and we expect this to grow over the next years so I think that's one example of something happening in practice and I wish when they would be able to see an European open degree not just an European degree but also an open European degree I think that would be very beautiful we are on that road slowly but we are going towards that direction thank you I think we have time for one more question and since we have one we have one in Slido but since we have one in the room we'll go to the room just wondering what your opinion is on balance between user choice sorry I didn't hear you sorry what's your opinion on the balance between user choice and technical support so if I'm a user I want it in my language I want to use it in Facebook that's what I'm familiar with yet technically are you going to be able to translate everything into every language have it compatible with Zoom and with Teams and with TikTok and everything else out there I know it's difficult I'm not a developer but I can only imagine what you face because I face that when people want to read these reports all the languages of the European Union they'll say oh what do we do and then normally we reach out to people who can help because sometimes we have budget for a formal translation sometimes we don't and then we put communities together and people offer are we going to translate this report into Greek are we going to translate into other languages so perhaps it's about it's a matter of collaboration but then it depends on the type of company if it's an open source to me there is no there's no clear answer I'm afraid but indeed it's something very important there has to be a balance we cannot provide everything at once but something to be thought about thank you thank you everyone, thank you for your amazing questions one last round of applause for Andrea thank you so much