 Okay, it's one o'clock and my name is Lisa Marie Blaschke and I am moderating the session today. Thank you everyone who is here. We have a really packed group of people and we've got a number of speakers, so I'd like to get us moving into the webinar today, which is titled, Ongoing Initiatives in Open Education within the European Union. And we have, as I mentioned, we have a number of distinguished speakers today. These speakers include Grania Knoll, Varena, I can never pronounce her last name, Valunke Ciene, Raimund Hudeck, Jochen Ernreich, Andrea Innamorato, Elena Calderola. So we've got a number of people today here to present on some of their initiatives, very distinguished speakers from a number of different areas of expertise. And so we're going to start out with Jochen Ernreich, who is a senior researcher at the Dua Hochschule in Baden-Württemberg in Heilbronn. He's built his expertise in fields like university governance, quality assurance and accreditation, lifelong learning, and technology transfer through hands-on project work at various institutions in higher education and in continuous education. He has a master's degree in economics and business administration from the University of Witten-Haudecke, which is Germany's first private university. And without further ado, I'd like to hand the floor over to Jochen so he can give his presentation about the OEPASS project. So Jochen, please go right ahead. Andrea, thank you for the kind introduction. I will present the project OEPASS. The aim of OEPASS is to make online and open learning comparable and recognizable within higher education. To achieve this, we are developing a learning passport, which is called the Open Education Passport. And we think that students in the future will be enrolled in their home university for the core curriculum, but they will select specialist courses online and from other education sources and will ask their home universities to recognize those as ECTS credits towards their degree. So that's why we are creating the Open Education Passport, which will create trust and transparency in the credentials that students collected somewhere else. And I will share some of the preliminary results with you and take you right into what we are doing. So you can see the project partners. It's an EU-funded Erasmus Plus project. And we have BME from Hungary. We are from Germany. Stift of a Bund from Germany. We have Eden. We have Kick from Malta. DDM from Lithuania. Stift of a Bund from Germany. Tambora University and UNED from Spain. And this is the project overview. So first, we analyzed credentials in Open Education. Then we identified a metadata standard suitable for the learning passport and we are developing the learning passport and we are at the testing stage right now. And number three, I told already that's the identification of the technologies and now four is the procedures using ECTS for Open Education because Open Education typically is not denominated in ECTS but rather in other, in workload in hours or days. And so we are developing procedures for converting it to make it recognizable in higher education. And the fifth intellectual output is a look into the future, how the future could look like. The current situation is that EU recognition instruments were created to enable student mobility but they were created to enable physical student mobility and with virtual mobility they don't always provide what we need. So the EQF is not for non-formal education. The diploma supplement is only for degrees. The ECTS is only for higher education. Other systems have other currencies of learning and the ESCO, European Skills Competence and Qualifications and Occupations Database is not used for higher education tools so far. So the challenge we have is on the right-hand side of this table that in virtual student mobility we want to transfer credit from online and other non-traditional short learning programs which might be offered not only by higher education institutions but also by other education and training sectors which are typically not higher education accredited which are often not described in ECTS but where identity verification processes and controlled assessment is much more complex and challenging than in face-to-face settings where we don't have a learning agreement from the home university usually and where we don't have as much transparency as the academic content and learning methodologies as we would have with a partner university abroad. So our solution is the learning passport which offers specific advantages to the student, to the higher education institution and to any open education provider. Basically we set out to create trust and transparency. The student wants to display accumulated and transfer credentials or credit with the learning passport, the higher education institution or the person or committee making the recognition decision they need sufficient information about the credential to make an informed and consistent decision on recognition of open learning as ECTS credits and also the open education providers they need to know which information they should provide in a credential and which requirements exist so that their credentials will be recognizable. So we looked at literature of course and for quality criteria of credentials. C1 to C7, so most literature has some combination of those, so identification of credentials and institution that is issuing the credential, identification of learner, learning outcomes, workload of learning, level of learning, quality of learning, assessment of learning outcomes or rules to earn the credentials. So this is the transparency side. Most existing projects looked at assessing the learning itself and we take a bit of a different perspective. We look at the information content that the credential provides and so we say a good credential must provide at least information on all those points and then we identified characteristics of a credential itself of the medium, it should be distinct, authentic, accessible, exchangeable and portable and we of course defined further what this means but I will not read it to you in detail because of the time. So the next step was to identify a data standard for the learning passport and we found the Micro-HE standard. Reimat will present the Micro-HE project after me and tell you more about it. So the Micro-HE project is developing or has developed a metadata standard on the European skills, competence qualifications and occupations basis to make open learning recognizable. So they focus on the tech side and we focus on the user side and on the procedures side of recognition. Using this metadata standard we created the learning passport which you can see here in small print and we are at the stage of testing it and revising it and making it more concise and usable at the moment and that is it already. I'm a bit ahead of time so if you have any questions but I could also pass over to Reimat now and to Lisa. Thank you Jochen. We were planning on waiting until the very end but since you did not use up all of your speaker time I think it would be alright if we answer one of the questions that's there and Grania has gone ahead and answered it briefly. Is the learning passport also for lifelong learners? Yes, it will be for lifelong learners. You will see more about it in Reimat's presentation on Micro-HE because the results we are generating at the moment will inform the next development of the EuroPASS and EuroPASS perceives several types of credentials and this will also be lifelong learning but the focus of... So it is possible but the focus of OEPASS is at the moment on higher education recognition. How do you compare these two batches? Open batches are too open for the purposes of higher education recognition so what we are developing is supplementing the landscape of credentials so most open batches are not... you cannot be sure that identity is verified and that it has controlled assessment conditions so I would say open batches are a bit lower positioned and what we are developing is with more stricter requirements. Okay, Ediko who is part of the project just posted a link to the learning passport. Okay, Irana has asked who is the first target group for the results of OEPASS? The first target group is higher education students who want to make their learning recognized by their home university but to do this of course the education provider would have to provide the credentials in the form of the higher education... of the open education passport. That is true. Okay, great. Well I think we are going to hand things over to Raimund thank you, you are welcome for your presentation. And Raimund, we are not able to see you in the webcam is it possible for you to enable your webcam so that the participants can see you? Okay, is it working now? We are not seeing you but we do hear you so that is good. Alright, so my name is... I would like to introduce you first. Raimund Hudeck is the head of the research labs also at the Duale Hochschule Warten-Württemberg in Germany has more than 15 years of experience as a senior lecturer and researcher at leading academic institutions and has been involved in various research programs in Germany and abroad. His research focus is in strategic collaboration among stakeholders, students, institutions and employers and the use of technologies for teaching and learning as well as open educational resources micro-credentials and short learning programs as new approaches to student-centered learning. He acts as a project manager at his institution and in several European-wide research programs. He has an MBA in business and international marketing from the Institute for Technology and Commerce in Germany. So Raimund, please go ahead with your presentation. You'll be talking to us... talking to us today about the project that Jochen mentioned before. So please go right ahead. Thank you Lisa for the introduction. Yes, I will talk about the project Micro-HE support future learning excellence through micro-credentialing in higher education. The main project aim is to create a model blockchain infrastructure for storing and automatically verifying credentials. So in addition to project aims to provide a comprehensive policy analysis of the impact of modernization, unbundling and micro-credentialing on higher education in Europe. And the challenges for the projects are to gather the state of the art in micro-credentialing in Europe at the moment. So this is one of the outputs. Then forecasting the impact of continued modernization of higher education on higher education institutions. Then proposing a credit supplement to give detailed information about micro-credentials. And this is the focus of my presentation now. Proposing a metadata standard and developing an online clearinghouse to facilitate the recognition transfer and portability of micro-credentials in Europe. Before I will go into the metadata standard and show you where we stand right now, I want to start with this short question. What is the value of qualification? So basically we can say the wide acceptance of degrees is as much a function of their technical value as of their inherent value. So these are the questions we are asking ourselves. So we are looking at the traditional view of qualifications as we all know it from EQF one to three, four on the high-bedside advanced certificate five, EQF level five, and then on the higher education side seven, eight, nine, and ten. So Bologna has improved the technical quality of qualifications such as recognition conventions, qualification frameworks, diploma supplements, credit systems, but no common European format exists for describing qualification and their learning outcomes and this hinders their comparability. But digital tools have been ignored so that's where we have our focus on in micro-age. The challenging idea as we see it is ECDS not qualifications should become the default unit of learning. A simple idea is to create a standard format for documenting micro-edentials in terms of ECDS using existing recognition tools. How to do it? Recognition conventions, extend principles of RASMOS agreement to offer the credit systems or qualification frameworks, extend to capture descriptions of two to sixty ECDS, diploma supplements replaced by credit supplements and the credit systems create the metadata standard. This is the framework which we have developed right now for digitally assigned credentials so we are looking at qualifications, we are looking at cost credentials, records of experience, certification of skills and the recognition statements. You can see at the bottom of this graph the metadata, awarding body, the credential owner, skills of learning outcomes for example. When we look at the qualifications obtained by the following accredited course certified by an awarding buddy so here digitally assigned qualification and self-certified claim of qualification with uploaded evidence and then the grade behind. Then on the cost credential site obtained following a course certified by awarding body digitally designed credentials and the self-certified claim of course credential with uploaded evidence. Records of experience for example obtained by employment, apprenticeship, volunteering experience or hobby certified by awarding body, digitally signed record of experience also self-certified claim of expertise with uploaded evidence and the certification of skills is obtained by irrelevant at the moment as we say certified by awarding body, digitally signed confirmed confirmation of skills and self-certified claim of skills. Here we now can have a look into the first mock-up of this blockchain tool. Here we can see the credentials clearing house on the bottom left. We can see the different levels and the views behind it for example administration view, institution view, participant view. So here we are looking at it from the three different perspectives the students, the higher education institute or on the provider side. The next level is the clearing house level two on the personal level so here for example John Smith you can see what kind of causes when he has completed it so that's already the level of a student or also of a lifelong learner. So here the same as Joran mentioned before we are not focusing on in micro-HE with the technical development of such a clearing house or such metadata standard on higher educations only in the future this will definitely be something used by lifelong learners post-graduation. The relevance of the project micro-HE Bologna has improved technical quality of qualification but only at qualification degree level although EQF aims to promote flexible learning pathways and focuses on learning outcomes independently and where the qualification has been acquired no common arrangements exist as we can see it for graded transfer and accumulation for qualifications related to EQF and that's why this project has been developed. That's it from my side. Thank you very much. Wonderful, thank you Jochen. Raimund, sorry. Thank you Raimund. Are there any questions? We have maybe a minute or two to answer a question or two before we move on to the next speaker. I don't see any questions showing up in the text box quite yet. How likely is it that an EU blockchain to enable such a system? How likely is it possible that it would enable such a system, an EU blockchain? We are not quite sure but the EU has already accepted this framework here on the Europas side so we are not quite sure if this will be accepted and later on as a blockchain technology but at least we've made a huge step forward that they will use our metadata standard as we developed it in Micro-AG. Okay. Reina has a question. If we talk on a program level are there elements of micro-segments that Micro-AG is talking about? So we are looking at, that's one of the outputs at various micro-credentials. So we said we will look at micro-credentials with ECDS points 5 plus so here we can definitely exclude digital batches. So we are looking into short learning programs and various other forms which are what we say at the level of 5C ECDS and plus. So we are looking at different forms of credentials in this project. Micro-credentials, sorry. Okay. James has a question and I think we'll take this last one before we move on to the next presenter. Do you think that things like e-portfolios or other forms of assessment would be needed to help give coherence a narrative to learning in that kind of desegregated open education? Well, we are not looking at that at the moment within this project but this when we talk about lifelong learning this will happen at the moment because the main, as I said at the beginning, the main focus of this project at the moment is to deliver the most comprehensive policy analysis at the moment for the EU here that the policies are developed first and the meta-standards are defined and then we are quite sure that this will open up to all different forms of micro-credentials in the future. So I would say it's a beginning of a new arena of the exact and acknowledgement of micro-credentials here in Europe. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Raimund and thank you Orna, Reina and James for your question. We're going to move on to the third speaker today who is Arena and I'm not going to butcher your last name again, Arena, who will be talking to us about the ReOpen Solutions Project, Open and Online Learning for Recognition. Arena has been working among leading researchers, methodology specialists and policy makers in the area of distance learning and development in Lithuania since 1998. She has a master's degree in Lithuania and has been working at Kaunas University of Technology as a distance learning, or she spent 11 years working at the Kaunas University of Technology as distance learning methodology specialist and researcher. She has a second master's degree from the University of Lithuania in Belgium in the pedagogy of higher education and also has a, she defended her dissertation on designing distance learning, teaching curriculum quality reflective assurance in 2008. She continued her research activities at the Tautus Magnus University and has been there since 2007 where she is the director of Innovative Studies Institute and Associate Professor at the Department of Education. Arena is a member of different projects. She's in FQL. She's also part of ICDE. She's a research group project member, study program evaluation expert in Latvia and she is also president of EDEN and the Lithuania Distance in E-Learning Association. So Arena please go right ahead. Thank you very much. It takes too long a little bit to this introduction, but actually why we put the open project on open education week in Europe? Because it is a solution that has been developed in order to find the illustration, I would say of the front end. If I compare to the two previous presentations, I could say they might be also talking about the back end solutions as programmers say, because they already talk a lot about the details and metadata and standards and new solutions in the infrastructure development. So reopen actually was the project that addressed the communication that was published in 2016, a study from a GRC on the validation of non-formal MOOC based learning. So at that time, the study came out, the problem has been analyzed for some time already among the consortium partners that you see in this slide and we thought that yes with this study and with the recommendations that are published there, we are ready to take the challenge and to go to address the priorities in the opening up of education and help institutions to collaborate and to meet the challenges that they have in terms of how to open curriculum through open educational resources, MOOCs, open collaboration, communication and what is most important in recognition and validation of non-formal open learning. We put the task to try to find a solution and examples through the project where high education with formal education non-formal education through the companies adult learning organizations CVET organizations and employers meet and agree that we recognize each other's work and we recognize achievements through open non-formal learning. So, in reopen, we plan to establish validated open learning practices for all these three categories of players and stakeholders to offer learning credentials for open and online learning curriculum but we limited our choice by then we didn't have OE pass, we didn't have micro high education, we didn't have other nice projects so we limited ourselves with the verification of loan identity setting learning agreement and other instrument for loan identity and authentication and agreeing on the learning outcomes that are going to be recognized and we also apply digital badges for recognition of learning achievements today we would call micro achievements and of course as well for negotiation and validation of the learning path. So, given this context I already jump to a solution that you can also actually reach now while I am presenting so, the solution is in several forms the first is the website reopen.eu that actually introduces the key concepts agreed what is validation, what is recognition what is open learning and who are the stakeholders in this triangle. The second format goes in the form of training material we have three training material that are available now in the first one you just need to register and you access it and you can use it in your institutions so the first one is on how to design non-formal open learning curriculum so what the description of the curriculum should appear there are templates, there are examples that you can download and use the second one is training material how to create a badge how to exploit it how to use it for different scenarios that you need for open learning non-formal learning and recognition and the third one which was challenging, interesting but now I think one of the most useful results is a recognition of non-formal open learning results in formal curricula so that was the target so to establish the link to match how formal non-formal curriculum and then employer needs can be linked together we thought it is important to ensure this link from the very beginning from the conceptual point of view but also until the very last moment when the curriculum or the course whatever you may call it is published online as an offer and demonstrates this link evidently in the description so you see in the example in the slide but also if you go online at reopen.eu and select any course suggested you will see links in all these courses the platform that has been established and has the concepts, training material courses and also the system itself we use the Moodle system of course and elaborated it with the requirements that have been highlighted during the development of the concepts and training material on how to implement that is also established as a solution a very simple one I would say use a friendly one and when we talk with employers with high education representatives from study departments, faculties and at the same time with non-formal education providers it is much easier to talk on the interface level, on the front front end level I would say so that they recognize immediately the elements that are familiar so for the first agreement, for the first negotiation I think that is a good example so again everyone can look at the platform download it, use it you just need to fill in the form and request it so institutions, consortia institutions I started with my university specifically as an example adapted the the ICT platform, adapted solutions and created online non-formal learning offers for their needs what is important also very important I would say is that we also have cases that have been established during the pilot phase of pre-open project and the cases demonstrate how the three stakeholders negotiated and reached agreement in terms of recognition of open and non-formal learning but also one interesting element I just had also experience and good discussions from international events that I presented this project in is that teachers themselves become better conscious about entrepreneurial skills they become stakeholders themselves they develop their offers they are involved in the process and track it from the beginning until the end realizing how important credentials are, how important agreements are and that they can increase their entrepreneurial skills but you will see which is here learning outcomes credentialization items and testimonies from teachers from education providers, formal and non-formal and from employers online so time is short I prepared for short presentation but if you have any questions or interest the link is here and I'm also here available to discuss this in the chat thank you thank you Arena we do have a question from Orna to pose to you before we move on what learning design model are you using for the non-formal training course? I would ask you what specific what do you mean learning design model but if you think about curriculum designing models then naturally we use dimensions that are important for all curriculum designing elements so first of all it is a triple consistency starting with the learning outcomes so competence is defined and then integrating all elements that are important for open learning in terms of resources also openness of activities collaboration and inviting of stakeholders but then we have a lot of other elements like digital credentials in this case, digital badges and other things so what is the learning design from who wrote a book about about that she'll go into that in a little more detail in her presentation so let's move on to the next topic, the next speaker today who is Elena Calderola Elena will be talking to us about open education in Italy challenges, opportunities and perspectives she's had 12 years of experience in e-learning is at present in charge of the head of innovation in didactics and digital communication units and coordinator at the University of Pavia in Italy works on a number of different projects within ICT and education for example projects on blended learning, digital corporate training learning space development LMS platforms multimedia and MOOC development online courses and virtual and mobility exchange she's an author and a co-author of many many articles and contributes to these topics within Italy and internationally and she is at present a member of the Eden Executive Committee so Elena please go right ahead and begin your presentation thank you very much Lisa for your kind introduction I was asked here to represent the Italian situation on going in the field of open education so I find in this day to have a look at various documents situation in situation and to have interview with many friends in Italy that are in the field of open education just to have an update of the situation in Italy we had different years different survey and discussion about the state of the heart of open education in Italy and in this slide and in this short presentation I tried really to put in evidence what I have discovered in this way so going on here I can start with the second slide first of all I really like to put in evidence which is the European Commission about the definition of open education I particularly like it because it put in evidence the main concept about the importance and the end view of open education and about the specific opportunities strategies about the advantages that open education can carry in higher education system in schools so highlighting the concept the main driver for sure will be the digital technologies and the scope is to widen access and participation to everyone by removing barriers and making learning accessible abundant and customizable for all and I really think that the previous European project shown in the presentation just go in this direction offers of course multiple ways for teaching and learning building and sharing knowledge it also provides a variety of access routes to formal and non-formal education and make connection with all these variables mentioned here in this slide so I really think that with the presentation of Jochen, Raimund and Irina we can really revise and rethink about the definition of European Commission and think about that all these elements were touched and improved of course here I cannot avoid to mention the schema of Andrea and Amorato de Santos about the ten dimension of open education of which six are the core situation inside the cycle and four the transversal one so we are talking about for open education about the field of strategy technology leadership and quality so going ahead now with this very short framework about the concept and the framework of open education in Europe I will try to design and to talk about what is going on in Italy the key drivers in Italy first of all at a policy level is for sure ICT that is mentioned in a official document from the ministry and from the Italian conference of lectures of course so we are moving in four difference and main field with the production of open educational sources, the production of open educational practices the production of massive open online books and not about production but about leading improving and the large the movement about the open arts so how can we face with this different dimension for open educational both in the school systems in Italy and in universities we have different experiences but at an institutional level where in open educational practices we have a lot of experience in the university above all about when we are speaking in a class on experience where in schools we are talking about practices from teachers who are enrolled and registered in different online situation that I am going to show in the very next slide for sure we can say that in Italy regarding open education the very strong sectors is given from the production of books in different shapes with different level with different ideas with different portals with different kind of approaches and we are going to talk about this open access our is a movement regarding above all open libraries, digital libraries and generally speaking the libraries of all the university system that wants to produce and access freely researcher for researcher and generally speaking for all the people in Italy and out of Italy to search and retrieve the result of the research so are the four main key drivers in open education two main how can I say evidence two main conference and two main events were organized by the conference of Italian university lecturers about open education the first one was a national working table about books in which as a group of university called there we were able to write down best practices rules and a sort of document and regular invitation in order to foster this movement of production of books and in order to giving to the Italian university just a shared idea on how the Italian university system could move in order to produce new we are in lack of some situation in Italy that is in a lack of of a general and strategy and policy design in how to move here or there in the production of books and with this action of the conference of Italian university lecturers we tried to give a guide on some of the movement in this direction the second main event in Italy was in Udine University of Udine 27 and 28 June in which directors organized 8 different working groups putting there in pair in fact you can see here the 8 different working groups paired 2 for 2 so we can read this kind of tuning system and the first one is the digital factor as driver for innovation and adaptive teaching and learning digital technologies for teaching and learning the second pair is maps of platforms and their interoperability and technological infrastructures and cyber security the third pair is books, challenges and opportunities linked with open access digital libraries and with data and finally the last pairs of working group is resources and action to support digital university in the European framework and knowledge certificate and coding which was the final result of the work of this 8 working group this is the Italian scenario we have in Italy these different main opportunities around MOOCs the first one is open with a general importance for MOOCs organized by a network of Italian university made by 19 university this group is growing and growing again and they are in the field to published together MOOCs for authentication to have an idea about how to recognize this MOOC in the ECTS system and how to recognize in no formal education with that. Then we have other situations like the University of Polytechnic of Milan and University of Bologna who made their own platform in order to release MOOCs one of Milan is a FOC that is Open Knowledge Polytechnic for Open Knowledge and the name is Bridging the Gap that is the idea to help students in bridging the gap between one kind of degree and one other kind of degree when you have the progression in your career and this is another idea then we have Federica who was born about the fact to publish in the first step OER and now in the second step as MOOCs from the University of Naples who want to have also other kind of partner coming from Italy and out there and another kind of other initiatives are from the University of Turin for their students this is above all for guidance for the students in their university careers and these are the main realities in Italian scenario here are another about the school just a couple of minutes again Lisa some representation from the landscape of the school in Italy so we have different kind of platform in which we have the possibilities for school to share to produce, publish and share Open Educational Students and the main initiatives at the national level was the National Plan for Digital School in which the ministry try to support the Open Education above all about to spread ICP in Italian schools just to finish some point to remark we are for sure not lacking in single initiatives for group of universities or single university who want to produce Open Educational initiatives and this is very good I can say that in one aspect or other aspect the main the most of the University in Italy are involved in producing MOOCs even if I have to say that MOOCs is not representing 100% what is the Open Education but in Italy at the present is the most movement for producing Open Education so we are lacking from the other end of the strategies from the point of view of ministry from the point of view of lacking of policy so we have such kind of problems in order to make understand to the teacher to the professor the importance to afford such kind of movement for students and for demographic education of the education in our country I can see here a lot of opportunities because anyway the movement is growing and is growing again a lot of university and professor are producing MOOCs in Italy and we are trying as a final result and final consideration of this presentation to find out the right business model in order to share for all the university not school I mean here university that is a higher education institution in order to support and to foster this movement and I think that I am out of time thank you very much Lisa for some minutes after also the 10 minutes and many thanks and many many greetings from the University of Padilla thank you very much if you have any questions I am here available for you. Thank you very much Elena there are some questions that have been emerging in the chat box you may want to join there and we will also be addressing more questions after the final speakers have presented we have two more speakers here today Andrea and Gradya I will first introduce Andrea who will be talking to she is from the European Commission and she will be talking to us about the guidelines on open education for academics how we modernize higher education practices and just to give you a little bit of background about Andrea as Elena mentioned she is one of the authors of the open education framework the 10 dimensions of open education she joined the JRC in September of 2013 and her role involves research and policy support on ICT for learning skills and open educational resources her work contributes to finding challenges of ICT and OER implementation at a policy level to innovate and modernize teaching, learning and training practices in Europe her current focus is on the promotion and update of openness in higher education institution and member states of the EU Andrea has a PhD in education technology from the open University of the UK and a masters in research methods for educational technology also from the OU she is a master in linguistics and literary studies in English language at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and she has worked as an OER researcher at the Open University for many years 2006 to 2011 and has been involved in many other OER and ICT related research projects in the UK as well as abroad so, Andrea I'm missing everybody's name today Andrea, let me just pass this over to you and we're looking forward to your presentation Thank you Lisa Can you just please, you can hear me well Yes, okay Great, so hello everybody Good afternoon to all the presenters and everyone who is watching us online My goal today is just to kind of do a sort of update on the work we are doing right now with regards to open education here at the JRC and try and explain how we've been building upon the work we started back in 2016 when we published the 10 dimensions of open education within the report called Opening Up Education and try and explain how we keep on trying and we are succeeding to keep open education in the main agenda of the European Commission So today I'm going to focus on the new work that we are going to publish very soon because I've just heard last week from Directorate General Education and Culture that what we proposed has been accepted so I have an okay to go ahead and publish and it is going to be it is called Practical Guidelines for Open Education for Academics. I'll show it to you in a second but before I talk about that I wanted to try and build up in these ideas because we started in 2006 focusing on opening up education for higher education institutions and that's when together with many stakeholders we came up with the definition that our colleague Elena just read just discussed in the previous presentation and we came up with the idea of the ten dimensions because we really wanted to make the case for open education going well beyond beyond open educational resources and MOOCs to include a number of actions that would require a mindset shift from academics from learners and from educators to be able to for us to be able to make it happen to open up educational practices. So that report was focusing on institutions let's say rectors, vice rectors faculty deans that was our main goal to obviously the audience is much broader but we were thinking our discourse there was for that type of level of institutions of staff of institutions. Then following that up we came up with a new research project also very comprehensive because we started the 28th member states of the European Union and we did a study on policies what sorts of policies on open education we have at a national level. So we inquired academics, we talked to ministries of education, ministries of culture and science and we published a couple of reports some of them, one of them which is the technical report presents a study for each country of the EU on how exactly they have been perceiving the concept of open education and the reports that we call more political let's say which is the going open one in which we place we have made policy recommendations for the European Commission itself and for member states. So here we have done two dimensions the institutional level and that's a policy level, a ministerial level more let's say broad perception of open education and then we realized that we needed to do more to help foster open education but this time from the bottom up because we've been working on from the top down and then we were thinking how about making it all let's say easier because we have been some of us here have been working on this field for many years but there are new academics, people that are just starting are people who actually don't know exactly how to go about open education. Very often they will focus on OER because it's easier let's say to understand or they will have heard about open access but they won't have let's say a broader perception of how to go about open education with regards to all those dimensions that have been talking about since 2016. So we proposed to the Directorate General Education and Culture of the European Commission to the Department of Higher Education that we wanted to do to develop a guidelines for academics but practical guidelines. So we went back to the ten dimensions and we developed practical guidelines based on those ten dimensions but we tried to be more didactical and this is about to be published it's now under design I've just lost my my connection here just a second please I lost my screen okay I'm back and it's I hope that by spring this year we are going to have it out so this is with response to the Digital Education Action Plan which I mentioned in this PowerPoint it was published last year the Digital Education Action Plan and there is a whole section on open science but we thought that open education as we perceive it really is transversal to most of the actions that are proposed by the Digital Education Action Plan and not only open science so obviously within the framework of the ten dimensions open science is dealt with within the research dimension no but everything related to digital competence and to open education in practices as a whole is actually so to the proposals of the Digital Education Action Plan so we understand that open education is becoming increasingly important and this is why we'll keep on trying and make it appear again within the agenda of the commission we know that the commission is going to have changes now with the president of the commission changing and all the commissioners and we are now preparing and proposing work for the next five years and we are tapping into open education I'm talking when I say we I'm talking about the JRC the Joint Research Center specifically but the topic is still very much in the agenda particularly now with the discussion of the recognition dimension which has been growing Irina has just mentioned the reopen project which is focusing on the recognition dimension the previous speaker to Aiden I was also talking about blockchain and credentials which in our view is also placed within the recognition dimension so it seems that we are now exploring open education within this different dimension and for us here and particularly for me it's an agenda that I really push forward the ultimate outcome that we can have is to have open degrees and that's something that we would really like to see happening because if we have content available as we are if universities start practicing more open educational practices why not make syllabi more flexible credentials more flexible and have joint agreements to be able to offer full degrees to open learners it may be still falling within the formal education aspect but of education not so this is what we mean we are bridging no try and bridge it on formal with formal learning so that's why we keep thinking that this would be the ultimate outcome and would like to see that happening and we think we have this opportunity now with the new initiative of the commission which is European universities which is pushing forward more collaboration between institutions and it's within that context that would like to propose experiments with open degrees at an EU level now very briefly about the guidelines I just I cannot show you the details of the guidelines simply because it has not been published but just to give you an idea what we do there so we go back to each dimension and this time we talk about the main concept also for example what is OER then we talk about the benefits of OER at four levels we are focusing on the academic themselves then for learners what are the benefits for learners for institutions and for the society so we are really trying to cover this four dimensions but then I went beyond talking about benefits and we also talked about challenges because everybody says the way the commission sometimes presents open education is that it's easily done and we know it's not that are challenges and this time we are focusing on the challenges as well what are the challenges for academics, for institutions for society and for learners to use it to understand open education resources and we do it for the ten dimensions of open education once we discuss the benefits and the challenges then we present some statements for reflection and it really is on the line of the digital competencies frameworks that we have we would really like to see academics self reflecting on their practices so just give an example and then I think I'm nearly done with my time I'm not really sure but just to give an example on how we have built it on a progression level so we have for example the first statement for humanities I choose to publish my content I'm not sure you can read it let me see yes you can say I choose to publish my research in open access journals no that's not OER sorry just a second I want to read OER because we are almost familiar with the OER ok so here we go try and follow the model with me I can identify the license of an educational resource if you are an academic so that you know that you can use that resource openly yes or no and a brief explanation again self reflection question 2 progressively becoming let's say a bit more complex I openly license education educational research materials that I produce ok yes or no and some explanation for self reflection then number 3 a bit more complex I appropriately reference the OER that I use whether I change them or not and then some explanation ok and we have only 5 levels for each one of them so this is something that I cannot I cannot go through in details but I just wanted to say that by creating this tool we hope to help academics at an individual level to change their practices but also to prompt to changes in their institution because they are key players, they are change makers, we'd like to see academics being ambassadors of change and we thought that creating a practical guideline for self reflection that is easy to use that can be used for all dimensions or for specific dimensions could help towards fostering open education now I think I'll stop here and I'll just say that we are also rebuilding a GRC website for open education and that we very soon release also two other reports on the continuous professional development of academics ok that's also planned to be done this spring that's all for me thank you Andrea we appreciate the input and the insights of what's happening at the EC in terms of open education practices for higher education instructors I'd like to move on to our last speaker today who is Granya Knoll who is head of the open education unit within the National Institute for Digital Learning at the Dublin City University before this she was a consultant and visiting professor at Dublin City University and has worked at five other universities Bath Spa Leicester Open University UK Southampton and Bristol her research interests include the use of technologies for learning open resources massive open online courses new approaches to designing for learning e-pedagogies and social media her particular area of specialty is the seven C's of learning design framework which she published in her book from 2016 which is used to help practitioners make pedagogically informed design decisions in order for them to make appropriate use of technology she's served on lots of editorial boards and has developed many special issues and Granya will be talking to us and reflecting on the impact of the open education movement go ahead Granya great this is just to give you a bit of an outline of what I'm going to talk about I'm going to draw on a recent report that's Mark Brown and I did for an organization called EENEE which gave a kind of overview of digital technologies and their impact on educational outcomes so that's the kind of outline of where I want to go and going back to the chat I will be talking about not only the seven C's framework but some of the other frameworks as well so a really seminal report from OECD in 2015 made the following that OECD has revolutionized virtually every aspect of our lives and students need to be engaged with it to participate fully in the economic, social and cultural life there are challenges such as information overload issues around plagiarism and online risk and of course privacy and risk is something increasingly important students need to become critical consumers of internet services and electronic media and make informed choices so if you haven't seen that report before I can thoroughly recommend reading it's a really seminal report so that kind of with the backdrop for our recent report we also drew on the work of P from the States on the affordances of digital technologies and I know you can't see that diagram very well but P talks about four phases of technology development the first is cultural speech for example second is the development of symbolic communication mechanisms words symbols numerical numbers the third is communication the fourth is networked technologies and the final one is cyber infrastructure so we've seen a new much more complex way in which we can communicate and collaborate affordances of technologies differ according to the technology the content and use and it's arguably all that the internet has been the most disruptive technology in the last 50 years it's amazing to think that it only emerged in the 90s now we couldn't imagine a world without it technologies can enable more interaction and communication they can help with potential use appropriately they can be engaging and motivational they can extend the classroom and I'll come back to that in a moment they can provide time interactive feedback they can personalize and they can enable more interaction in terms of the division between virtual and real markdown has a nice little sign which he refers to as digital learning ecology you've got the different quadrants that you've got in school in class out of school in class you've got a leakage between the real and virtual and there's very much a blurring of the boundaries and I think this is a reference feedback of course to Andrea's talk we've got the seminal report of opening up education and I wanted to talk in particular around open practices in terms of OER arm loops and e-tech books we draw on the work of Adam Froden who's now a national forum here in Ireland and she talks about the use of open practices of complex personalizing and contextualizing John Olcott talks about a continuum of openness and access so what's the impact? I'm going to talk about the impact at three levels in terms of learners in terms of teachers and in terms of researchers in terms of learners they can interact with rich open educational resources they can participate in a lot of open online courses about learning and sales and we've also been drawing on work here with my colleagues looking at flexibility and cost effectiveness and interestingly in the work that he and colleagues have been doing students are interacting with e-tech books because they're cheap or they're free not because of the increased interactivity the offer teachers can have new approaches to design and we'll come back to that and they can take the books for continuing professional development researchers now completely transformed by social media and the ability to be part of an international global community of peers and we see an opening up of digital scholarship In a conference I took part in last year looked at the future of open learning and there's a link there to a blog post I wrote about it in terms of the key aspects and these are some of the challenges identified we have a lack of digital literacy to really make effective use of technologies technology is still sadly in most institutions the poor sister to research we're seeing new forms of accreditation emerging as we've heard in the talks today we need senior management to understand technologies and have buy-in to them we need appropriate CPD and we're seeing an unbundling of education where students in the future may not choose to take a three year full time degree but they pay for particular components Continuing professional development is vital and this was a key message from the report that Mark and I did in particular the central role of a teacher and the fact that CPD can enable teachers to be more innovative and make more effective use of digital technologies and there's a variety of different formats which can be used for different purposes often actually just the sharing of good practice among practitioners is very effective my colleague Orner who I think is still here in the chat box is leading on a new initiative called Open Teach which we're very very excited about which is funded by the National Forum the National Forum we draw on the quotes it's about empowering staff to create, discover and engage meaningful personal and professional development we have about a thousand DPU connected online students and they're supported by 90 tutors across Ireland and this initiative is aimed to create an online course which will help them more effectively support our online students so we're going to have a number of modules we're going to look at open online pedagogy online assessments and feedback modes of enabling online teaching effective student support ways to foster communication and collaboration creating engaging contact and facilitating reflection so we're literally just in the process of interviewing for a learning designer for that post that we're kicking off in April to do keep an eye out for that will certainly be tweeting lots about it on social media I've fairly mentioned some frameworks this is from a chapter of a book I've just submitted to Rona Sharpe and Helen Beatham's third edition of Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Agent in that chapter I grouped nine frameworks into three types frameworks for guiding the use of technology, media and materials that's the SAMR framework, the sections framework and the co-op framework workshop approaches such as the Seven Seas of Learning Design the A2M hybrid learning model and the very effective ABC learning design project inspired by Diana Laurelard's work and approaches based on specific theory of learning engagement in particular the ICAP framework if you're interested in that chapter do email me I'd be happy to send you a draft copy of it I'm just going to focus in on one of those, the Seven Seas this consists of creating a vision for the course in terms of conceptualizing the course full seeds to do with activities, creating resources fostering communication and collaboration and a constituency to do with enabling reflection and demonstration of achievement of learning outcomes i.e. the assessment component the combined seed gets the designers to step back and look at the design from different perspectives and finally the consolidated seed is about influencing and evaluating how effective the design is so each of these seeds have associated with it a whole set of resources and activities and I run lots of workshops on this to complement learning design I think learning analytics is very important a real buzz word at the moment it can be used by teachers to see what learners are doing to identify what they're struggling with and support them and provide targeted feedback the learners can also see the patterns of their learning so it might say you seem to be doing all your learning on a Sunday afternoon research shows it's better to do it in bite size chunks throughout the week so they can receive valuable feedback they can compare their learners again to their classmates so if you appear to have done four hours of learning this week your class waits on average of spending 10 hours and they can set and review their learning goals so still a bit of a buzz word but I think learning analytics complemented with learning design it's going to be very very important and powerful in the near future so final reflections again going back to the report Mark and I wrote these were the kind of final reflections and recommendations we made firstly that the digital learning ecology is complex and we need more research to understand it the importance of affordances and understanding them there's no single metaphor for 21st century learning and support for learning needs to match learning needs and the context of learning assessment needs to support deep learning we know assessment is a key driver it needs to be purposeful and support active authentic and meaningful learning and finally teachers' mindsets are really important it doesn't matter how good the design is or how good the technology is teachers matter most but also leadership and the institutional culture is important and needs to be enabling of these technologies and we need to change from looking at education in change education for change and the very final slide change as a constant change isn't just one thing just one time just one big revolution change occurs in stages and phases which each adding depth color character and creating a multidimensional union this is a quote from Winnie the Pooh how does one become a butterfly at the earth you must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a butterfly so that's our final quote and I just want to blatantly promote the conference we're running here in November the world conference on online learning which is in the iconic Dublin conference centre really recommends you come to that it's going to be a fantastic event thanks for listening and I think that's me done thank you Grodney a great presentation all of our presenters I'd like to open the floor now to questions that you may have for Grodney or for anyone else who presented today we have some questions that were not answered for example for Elena there was the question of do you think open university libraries could play or have a role towards open education and there was also one for Andrea from Sinead who asked if open degrees sound very interesting at what do you think the funding model would be so those are a couple of questions for our speakers perhaps Elena you could start with that first question about whether you think open university libraries yes of course I really think that open access and open libraries would be a great role in open education because in there we can qualify the point to share, qualify the resources for a scholar and for my education so I really think that we play a great role for open education Andrea would you like to tackle the second question I tried and typed something on the chat basically I think that talking about business models is really complicated because universities have their own way of seeing education of receiving funding depending on their national government or so and so forth but the concept of open degree that I'm trying to present here is not dependent upon a specific funding model or business model but more about existing models and collaboration between universities it's not a new thing just think back of the open university UK they've been offering open degrees for a very long time now you can have a degree open this is the name of degree what does this mean means that you have studied different subject areas you have passed them all you got credits for them all but at the end of it you don't have any specialization you know you have a number of different credits that you studied in different subject areas that together due to your cognitive work in the amount of time you can be granted a degree so an open degree can be an open degree with no specialization but just showing that someone has gone through the cognitive process of higher education or a specialized degree knowing something in particular like being a teacher whatever that is in which universities just have to come together and combine and discuss their syllabi and discuss their credits and discuss mutual recognition which is an agenda that we are pushing forward heavily now with this council recommendation of diplomas in higher education and because we aim to create this European education area by 2020 and with this new initiative of the European universities there is an opportunity now to tap into all of this and create this model of degrees that is not really fighting against the official the traditional because both of them would be official but the traditional degrees is just a different way of studying in an alternative way for the task force or people to be able to re-skill and up-skill because there is a huge skills gap as the European Union nowadays and open education has the potential to help us bridge that gap and also increase the digital competence of people but then universities have to play a key role on collaborating promoting these degrees and help people really improve their digital competence but also be defined there is no specific model on this yet okay thank you there is a lot of chatter going on in the chat box at the moment to a question that Irena posted open science is still a complicated concept do you agree that we need more explainers and trainers on open science and open education and I think this is not addressed to anyone specifically on the panel but anyone could answer it at this point and I would like to Granya I think open science is really critical and again as I mentioned in my talk we really opened up the research space by being part of a global community of peers and there is huge opportunities for this when I was a chemist way back when we did some work at Southampton where we were opening up data directly to students and making it available and that had a huge impact on the way that students were participating so there is a lot more we can do to open up science Irena did you want to say something yes I think the complexity is that we as Andrea mentioned we have been working on the idea of open education for many years already and I think you know it always comes to two ends so to say one is the academics, the professionals the teachers who are working with it and try to realize establish, create and then practice open education scenarios whatever they may be but on the other hand the other one the other side is actually the administration of the institution who always ask, re-ask and reinvent the questions again what is the impact, what is the effect of open education and now we have great practices great projects great pilots even for open collaboration of teachers, open collaboration of institutions students but in order to mainstream all types of effect evidences are important and this goes back to science I think we need to research and to demonstrate the impact already reached through digital competencies through collaboration but now when we speak about open degree I think this is a great chance for us in line with the initiative of European University Network and with other initiatives to demonstrate actually that universities may create alliances universities and other higher education and other institutions they may create alliances and create their own models of learning so we will not receive a solution or a recipe but I think this is a great opportunity and maybe this could be the talk that also can be understood by administration you know when we go deep enough administration scenarios into metadata into infrastructure development this is more like an operational side of already accepted decisions but we also need to talk on the level of administration and policy makers and policy policy decision also level I think we sometimes are closer than with the administration of universities and colleges Andrea and Jochen did you have something that you would like to add to what Reina has said No I don't Andrea It's the first time that I'm speaking in public now the second about open degrees and it's interesting to see the reactions this is an idea that we've started presenting to Director General Education and Culture we were about to start a project on it and we decided to step back because of the things in the agenda but I'm hoping that we'll be able to get back to it at some point but in any case I thought it was in line with this idea of sharing with the open education movement that I could already share with you that this is something that we'd like to see happening and maybe you also come up with ideas and help us build the momentum to see what it can do about it now of course someone mentioned before about costs of course I mean this conversation about costs that happened in open education yes but we're not talking about something to replace traditional education systems but something to go alongside with it so if we create MOOCs and we already create MOOCs maybe we could charge for assessment this is something we discuss so much in the open credit report which Reina participated maybe we could charge for the actual certification so there has to be other models that we need to think about and jointly discuss and decide upon but there are possibilities but it's all about collaboration so now here comes the main challenge how can we actually collaborate in the line our frameworks our requirements our national requirements and how can we jointly make those things happen so it's challenging but it's not impossible thank you Andrea we have a minute left so what I'd like to do is wrap up before we end thank our speakers for giving very excellent presentations today really enjoyed hearing about the different projects from using learner passports of prior learning from Yelkin on the OE Pass from Reimond about recognizing the micro credentials with the micro HE project and then Reina's talk about re-open and informal and non-formal learning and really about refining and redefining openness and Elena really enjoyed your look at how open education in Italy what the key drivers are open education resources and practices, MOOCs, open access and the kinds of best practices and rules that you're looking at within Italy and for higher education institutions Andrea we're all looking forward to hearing about the upcoming publication of the OEC getting our hands on that from the Joint Research Center just to put in another plug for that modernizing higher education for practitioners open educational practices and then finally thank you for giving us your reflections and your insights and your thoughts about the open education movement where we've been and the direction that we're moving in right now for the Secretary at for your support during this presentation and of course all the participants who came today to listen to our presenters to hear about the projects to hear about some of the initiatives that are happening within the EU around openness I'd like to remind you that we have a couple more sessions coming up over the next two days for open education week tomorrow and on Friday so if you're interested in more topics on open research open education please be sure to sign up for those the recordings will be available on the Eden website so if you weren't able to attend the entire session or would like to see the session again please be sure to check on the Eden website and finally I would like to remind everyone as Grania did with ICDE we have and the Dublin conference coming up we also have a conference coming up this summer with Eden which is going to be in Bruges and we hope that we will you are there in person thank you for everyone for coming again and our presenters