 And we are now recording and welcome to today's CPD webinar session and I'm just handing over to you, Alexander. All right, thanks very much Debbie. So, first of all, apologies for any background noise you may hear. There is builders outside my building and replacing the cladding. So you may hear the occasional drilling or shouting. So I hope this is not, I hope it's not too much noise. So, I'm Alexander Mikroyanidis. I work at the Open University in the UK. And my specialty, my expertise is in technology enhanced learning. I've been working for more than 10 years on different European and nationally funded projects that have to do with different aspects of enhancing learning through technology. And specifically with specific focus on personalized learning, on lifelong learning, on open education and open educational resources. And more recently I've also been working on blockchain technologies and their applications in education. So within this webinar we'll see, I'll talk about a specific project that I'm currently working on, which is called Quality Chain. This is a European funded Horizon 2020 project. And within this project we are looking at different ways of using blockchains in education and employment. And my involvement in the project has to do with lifelong learning and specifically facilitating lifelong learning through the use of blockchain technology. Right, let's go to the next slide. So what is the general motivation behind this work? It is a fact that the education model today is quite centralized. Education is controlled mainly by educational institutions that provide certification mechanisms that provide quality assurance. But this is not sustainable in the sense that a lot of learning increasingly happens outside the brick and mortar lecture halls. It happens within communities of like-minded individuals or by contributing to projects and initiatives in the real world. Learning is also far more international than it used to be. There is the need for students, for example, to travel to different countries to improve their employability prospects. And this causes different problems when it comes to recognizing learning achievements across borders. And also in our society we live in a networked, digitally empowered world. Especially this is quite obvious, especially these days during the pandemic and the post-pandemic era. Where the achievements, knowledge and skills are not... The education providers do not have the remit or the means and capacity to cover all the wide range of activities that the learners engage with, which attest to these achievements and skills. Right, so this is our vision towards a more decentralized education model. Where the awarding and validation of qualifications does not occur exclusively under the management of an education institution or an employer. But the ownership of the learning experience and its outcomes is transferred to individual students, teachers and peers, at the same time without compromising on the safety, security and accessibility. A few words about what is blockchain. This is quite well known in the context of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin. But blockchain is a lot more than that. It is a cryptographically secure, shared and distributed ledger. Within this ledger each block aggregates a time-stamped batch of transactions and is identified by a cryptographic signature. All these blocks are buck linked so that the chain can be traced all the way back to the very first block created. And in a nutshell, this ledger, the blockchain, contains an uneditable record of all transactions. So this is essentially what the blockchain offers us is an immutable and instantly verifiable ledger, which is not controlled by a central authority but is equally distributed and shared among the different nodes of the network. Right, so a few words about the QualiChain project. As I mentioned, this is Horizon 2020, a European-funded project. It started two years ago. We are currently in the third and final year. We have 10 partners, both educational institutions and also public agencies in countries like Greece and Portugal, where we are investigating how decentralization and how blockchain technology can help with different aspects of employment and recruitment in the public sector. So the project objectives are generally the creation, piloting and evaluation of decentralized solutions for storing, sharing and verifying educational employment qualifications. Within the project, we are assessing the different kinds of impact, technical, political, socio-economic, legal and cultural that these decentralized solutions can have on education and also on employability. So within the project, we are targeting four key areas. The first one is lifelong learning. The second one is smart curriculum design. The third one is public sector staffing. And the fourth and final one is human resources consultancy and competency management services. Within these four key areas, we are conducting pilots, which I will present right now. So the first pilot has to do with university process optimization through smart curriculum design. This is led by the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. And this pilot aims to optimize the university operation and curriculum design, as well as facilitate the validation and verification of skills and qualifications of both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The goals of this pilot are first of all to provide analytics and recommendations so that the curriculum of a higher institution in this case, the NTUA, can be redesigned and updated based on the skills gaps identified in the job market and also based on the feedback from students and staff. And the second goal of this pilot is the student accreditation and also lecturer validation and recognition through a trusted, immutable and secure blockchain ledger. So within this pilot, we are building an ecosystem where students are being awarded with blockchain badges, which are immutable and secure. And at the same time, they are also providing their feedback and recognition to their educators, to the lecturers through blockchain badges. The second pilot has to do with staffing the public sector and we are looking at a case study in Greece. This pilot is conducted by the Supreme Council for Civil Personnel Selection, a CEP, which is the main authority in Greece for ensuring the transparent and quality assured recruitment of public servants. And this is done in collaboration, this pilot is conducted in collaboration with the Hellenic Parliament. So this pilot has the following objectives to provide personalized candidate notifications for job vacancies by matching individual profiles with available jobs in the civil service, to validate academic and professional qualifications of individual candidates, and finally to improve the efficiency of the recruitment process in terms of time and credibility. The third pilot of QualiChain has to do with again staffing the public sector, but this time in Portugal. So this pilot is leveraging QualiChain in order to staff the Portuguese public sector. And at the core of this approach, we have the Phoenix EDU system, which is used in Portugal very widely by universities that want to provide a digital alternative for certification to their graduates. So this is a platform, Phoenix EDU is an academic management platform that supports full program and course management and includes the issuing of certificates or diplomas to graduates in Portugal. So this integration of the Phoenix EDU system with QualiChain allows the diplomas issued by Phoenix EDU to be automatically inserted into our blockchain, the QualiChain blockchain, so that the Portuguese public administration can have access to all certificates issued by Portuguese universities and in order to ensure the authenticity and integrity of these diplomas. Right, the next pilot has to do with recruitment and competency management services. This is again a case study in Portugal and specifically in the region of Madeira, where we are targeting the, we have partnered with a government agency that is responsible for health personnel administration in this Portuguese region. So the main goals of this pilot are the support of the implementation and coordination of human resources management policies in the health sector, speeding up the recruitment process by validating the CVs of applicants, facilitating the selection and mobility process using semantic matching methods in order to pair job opportunities with the best candidates, and finally to perform identification of gaps in the skills of employees and suggest training for skill development. Finally, the last pilot which I am leading on behalf of the Open University has to do with lifelong learning and how blockchain technologies can support lifelong learners in their learning journey and also in advancing their career. The objectives of this pilot are the award of lifelong learners with transparent and immutable educational accreditation. And on top of that, we want to offer lifelong learners with personalized recommendations so that we support them in reaching their personal or professional learning goals. The stakeholders of this pilot are mainly lifelong learners. These are learners that pursue learning throughout their lifetime for either personal or professional reasons. And also educational institutions. These are institutions that provide education or training services either paid ones or free. This is the main use case we are looking into within this pilot. So we have the lifelong learner who studies online courses. These can be paid or free courses such as open educational resources and MOOCs. And at the same time, the educational institution is offering these courses and is also offering smart budgets. These are blockchain-based budgets as a recognition of the learning achievements of the lifelong learners. So the lifelong learner has a personal e-portfolio which is based on the blockchain and this portfolio contains their smart budgets. These budgets are immutable and instantly verifiable accreditation. And they also contain the key skills that the learner has acquired. So on top of that, we can provide by using this information from the smart budgets, we can offer personalized recommendations about jobs that match the skills that the lifelong learner has already acquired or courses that will help the learner acquire additional skills in order to progress their career or reach a personal learning goal. So in the next slide, you can see a mock-up screen of the job recommendations that we offer within this pilot. On the top half of the screen, you can see a map view of job recommendations. These are jobs that are recommended to the learner and are a full match to the skills of the learner. And on the bottom half of the screen, you can see job recommendations for job openings that are partial, that the skills required are a partial match to the skills that the lifelong learner has already acquired. So for these job recommendations, the learner can be offered course recommendations. These are courses that will offer to the lifelong learner the missing skills, the skills that are required to progress their career towards the job of their preference. So within the past two years, I have been engaging the community around lifelong learners, around lifelong learning, and I have been eliciting requirements from groups of learners, of educators, of researchers and practitioners within major educational technology conferences. So in the next slide, I will show you some of these, some of the findings that have emerged from this consultation exercise. First of all, these are four major themes that have emerged and reflect the major challenges associated today with lifelong learning. So the first theme has to do with immutable formal and informal qualifications. So this theme has to do with the aggregation of both formal and informal qualifications that can be easily validated by employers and also educational institutions. The second theme that has emerged has to do with lifelong learning pathways and micro-credentials. Specifically with the need that learners should receive guidance in building lifelong learning pathways and acquiring micro-credentials in order to achieve their learning goals. This is quite important, especially in the current situation where we are moving in a post-COVID area, in a post-pandemic era, but the job market is still quite fluid and there needs to be flexibility in upskilling or reskilling of lifelong learners and job seekers. And this is what micro-credentials offer and we are looking into specifically how to offer this flexible accreditation in a decentralized way using blockchain technology. The third theme has to do with career counseling. Again, this is quite crucial regarding the job market crisis and the fluidity of the skills required and the current trends in the job market. Job seekers should be provided with a comprehensive overview of the job market and the latest market trends so that they can adjust, they can plan accordingly their lifelong learning journey and seek the appropriate learning opportunities to acquire the necessary skills. Finally, a major theme that emerged has to do with data ownership and privacy. This is quite important. It is a need for learners and job seekers to own their digital identity and their e-portfolio data and to be able to control third-party access to this data, who can access it, for how long and in what ways. So these are the major themes we have identified within this pilot and we are working towards implementing, towards addressing these requirements and implementing them within the tools and within the platform offered by the Quality Chain project. The next steps of this work, as I mentioned, we are currently in the process of launching an online platform which addresses the requirements that I mentioned before, not only specifically about lifelong learning but also regarding the other pilots of the project that I mentioned earlier. For example, public sector recruitment, competency management services and the next step will be to pilot this platform, engage stakeholders through dedicated workshops and also through other opportunities and online channels, for example, open online courses and webinars. Finally, we want to collate and publish all the lessons learned and best practices that we have acquired from the development for this. I hope it doesn't happen again. So finally, we want to publish and share with the community, the lessons learned and best practices that we have acquired from this project and from engaging stakeholders and piloting the Quality Chain decentralized platform. So one last thing I would like to mention is that we are organizing a special issue on blockchain-based decentralized solutions for learning empowerment, education, re-engineering and public sector transformation. This will be published in the new Elsevier Journal, Blockchain Research and Applications. So the call is already open and it will be open until February of next year and it will contain not only work related to Quality Chain, not only work conducted within Quality Chain but also external work. So if you are interested, if you are working on this area, please get in touch with me. I am the leading guest editor for this special issue. If you would like to get more information about this initiative. Thanks very much everyone for your attention. You can see on this slide the main ways to follow this work on the project website and also on our social media. And now I will be happy to take any questions. Thanks very much for that, Alexander. That's really interesting. And your builders are obviously still there but not too worried. It's unfortunate timing really because it depends on the part of the building they are working on. They are not always outside my window but they have chosen this moment to come right outside my window to do their work. So again I am really sorry about that. I hope it wasn't too distracting throughout the presentation. Oh bless, it was already a little bit. No problem. So thanks very much. Does anybody have any kind of questions or maybe just some kind of comments that perhaps we could just have a discussion to see if there is anything further you want to know? If you haven't got your mic you can pop something in the chat as well and we can pick it up that way. Or are we just sort of having a think about it at the moment? I can't see anything in the chat. It doesn't look like we have any questions at the moment. I suppose yeah, if something... I'll be available to answer any questions offline as well if someone wants to get in touch. As I said, yeah, this is an ongoing project so I'll be happy to receive any feedback and please do get in touch or stay in touch with the project if you'd like to learn more about our activities. We are doing several workshops within ALT conferences. I did a workshop last month at the OER Educational Conference and I'll be doing several sessions in some other conferences later this year. I hope there will be an opportunity to do another workshop at the ALT conference in September. So hopefully I will have a chance to talk to ALT members again in some future events. But do get in touch if you'd like to learn more about this work. I can already see a question in the chat from Santel. Do you think many more institutions will get on board with blockchain for learning and education? It's still early days. So there are several research initiatives happening across Europe mostly at an experimental piloting scale. So I'm already aware of a few cases that institutions have actually deployed these technologies in real life with their students. For example, the University of Nicosia in Cyprus have already been awarding blockchain-based certificates for quite some time now. At the Open University we have been part of a national project, the Institute of Coding, where we have been awarding blockchain-based certificates to our students and also to the students from other universities, from other UK universities that have been part of the project, like the University of Bath. But again, I must say that this is quite an emerging topic. So there are not a lot of cases where there is a real deployment with large accreditation in higher education. I think we are still at the level where we are building the infrastructure and we are conducting experiments with different use cases and different scenarios. But these paradigms, these technologies do hold a lot of potential, so I do expect to see much more uptake in the coming years. I can see another question from Caroline regarding the scope for more micro-cudentials to be provided by educational institutes to meet the missing skills identified by the system. So, as I mentioned, yes, the micro-cudentials and general flexible accreditation towards reskilling or upskilling is one of our major goals. And we want to, within Quality Chain and beyond Quality Chain, we want to help lifelong learners in this respect. This is also part of the mission of the Open University to give new opportunities to mature learners, to give a second chance to someone who wants to change their career path or improve their careers. And so this is also a goal that we have not as a Quality Chain project but also as the Open University. And you may be aware that we have already launched a micro-cudentials program together with the future Learn MOOC platform. Right. I hope these have answered your questions for example, and Caroline, if you'd like to add something, please type in the chat or you can unmute your microphones. Are there any other questions or generally any comments you would like to bring up? I hope they're quiet. That's typical. There's some great questions in there for everybody for posting those on there. Did you say you were going to let us have a copy of the slides, Alex? Yes, I'll be happy to send you the slides afterwards. Yeah, that'd be great. Send them to me and then I can ask Christina to get them out when she sends the recording to everybody then. All right, great. Awesome. Well, thank you ever so much. And if there aren't any more questions or comments, then I think we'll call that done. But thank you very much. Thank you, it's really interesting. And thanks everybody for your comments and lovely feedback there for Alex in the chat for a very interesting and must be watched anywhere this, I think. Lovely. All right. Well, thank you very much. Oh, there's one more comment on there from Jacqueline. Did you see that there, Alice? Yes, I can... The question has to do with blockchain-based digital credential system that the Institute of Banking in Ireland have introduced in collaboration with the University of College Dublin and Deloitte. So I'm not aware of this initiative but I'd be happy to learn more. So please, Jacqueline, please get in touch. Both as the Open University and as Quality Chain, we are open to collaborations. You can see on our website that we are on the Quality Chain website that we have launched partnerships with some projects and some European initiative. So I'll be happy to get in touch with the people behind this initiative that you mentioned, Jacqueline. Thanks very much. Lovely. Oh, that's great. Really, really helpful. Lovely. OK then. Well, if we're all done, we'll close this down a little bit early and you go and get to have some lunch. Great. Thanks so much for coming along and thanks for giving up your time today to do this. Thanks everyone. It's been great. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye. Jacqueline, I'll make sure we put it in the email for you when it goes out. So thanks ever so much for that. Take care, everyone. Bye now.