 So, hello everyone, warm welcome to today Eden session related to the education in a time of new normal. I'm very happy that we have today on the agenda the new digital action plan. Just let me briefly give you an overview of Eden initiative related to the education in time of pandemic. As you know, when we were faced with the pandemic in February, March, which affected all our lives in every sphere, especially education, Eden promptly responded starting with the initiative education in time of pandemic. And already on March 30 we started with a series of even webinars practical webinars aimed for teachers and educators to help them find out how to organize their teaching and learning online and to help ensure that all students have access to materials to the courses and to finish the school or academic year. We run for 11 weeks. We had 35 speakers and moderators over 3500 participants, and till now we had more than 9100 views of recordings based on very good feedback from the participants for the spring initiative. And they wish that we continue with this initiative. We started the autumn initiative, slightly different title education in time of new normal. Today this is our sixth and last webinar in this initiative. So far we have 26 speakers, over 730 participants and till the webinar number five we had review recordings more than 1000. So I'm very happy that we are finishing our autumn initiative with new digital action plan, its presentation. I think as this new digital action plan was just planned to come for our last webinar to be on time. He was recently adopted by European Commission, and definitely this digital action plan is trying to address the challenges arising from ongoing COVID-19 crisis and long term digital transformation. I'm certain that you all recall the digital action plan from 2018 to 2020, which had priorities in a way that how to make better use of digital technologies for teaching and learning and digital competencies and skills of citizens, educators, students, everyone, and also improving education through better data analysis and foresight. And definitely via the number of activities there was an impact on how to enable the member European member countries develop the competencies of their educators and students and how to integrate digital technologies into education process in a proper way in a way to enhance the quality of education. I think that this new digital action plan was wisely planned in a way that it gathered the stakeholders and also the public to participate to give the feedback and based on their feedback during the first part of the COVID crisis. I think that very well conclusions have been made and new priorities have been created. And why do we need such plans? Definitely so that European countries have some kind of guidance, some kind of the service where they can find the ideas and guidelines, how to prepare and how to integrate their educators. And I think that there are a lot of educational systems in a way that they collaborate and that they respond to the need of digital society, but also to be able to work together jointly with European countries in sharing the experience, but also enabling the mobility of the students as well. So today we have the title of the session digital education action plan 2021-2027 resetting education and training for the digital age, and I'm very happy to have the authors of this action plan with us. And also, let me introduce the speakers today, Georgi Dimitrov, who is deputy head of unit innovation and European Institute of Innovation and Technology and project leader on a new digital education plan from Directorate General Education, New Sports and Culture at European Commission. Georgi has been with European Commission for quite a while, having a number of roles. So I'm very happy that he was behind the motor behind this new digital action plan. And we were, as Eden, also honored to be able to contribute small in a small way to development and gathering of the feedback on this digital action plan. Also with us is Veronica Movilio, policy officer from Directorate General Education, New Sports and Culture, who was also been contributing to the implementation and update of the Commission's digital education action plan. And she led the activities connected to the evidence base of digital education action plan 2021-2027 and its staff working document. And Yves Pouni, deputy head of unit human capital and employment joint research center from European Commission. And he is reading its research and policy activities on digital learning and skills research area providing evidence based policy support to European Commission on harnessing the potential of digital technologies to innovate education and training processes, to improve access to lifelong learning and other things. So thank you all for being with us today for wanting to share the best of the new digital action plan. So I would like Georgi to give the floor to you to hear from the first hand why this digital education action plan and how can we all benefit from it. Thank you, floor is yours. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Sandra. And good afternoon to everybody here. I should add around the globe. I was just following the chat and then I saw people from many, many places, which is one of the fascinating parts of this new normal. And to be able to meet you at the same time and to discuss our work is a privilege for us as well. So we are very glad to have been invited to be here with you. I should start by thanking Eden and especially you, Sandra, for this excellent opportunity to speak to you and to discuss. As you have mentioned, we have already spoken about the action plan in the last few months and we consider ourselves to be quite lucky to be able to work firsthand with the researchers who are actually the people on the ground and the real experts. So I'm very glad that we can today talk to you and with you about our work. And it's true, you have a very nice title of the whole webinar series, Education in a Time of New Normal. I don't think that I should elaborate too much on this. Thank you. I should just say that probably as trivial as it might sound, I think that this year and in particular this pandemic is probably one of the greatest challenges to education and training systems in decades that we have experienced. Unfortunately, it's by far not yet over. Nevertheless, I am an optimist type of person, so I always look to the bright side and this is why I would also add that this crisis has also led to a leap in terms of the digital transformation and in particular in education and training, which I think would have taken otherwise perhaps some years. So there are always pros and cons of the things that happen around us. I think that the COVID-19 crisis was the first experience for many people in terms of distance and online learning. In fact, you will hear a little bit more later from my colleague on the results of the consultation, but I think our open public consultation show that for 60% of the people this has been the first experience. Obviously, many of them in primary and secondary education by far not as many in higher education, but still we're talking about a very qualitative difference. And I think that what we have seen generally speaking is that we have essentially seen problems that we knew were there, but they were basically put to the surface and they were accelerated. We have seen huge gaps in connectivity and infrastructure. We have seen deficiencies in the skills of teachers and educators. We have also seen in particular for younger pupils and students, we have seen many parents who were overwhelmed by the situation. We have seen also young people who have been lacking to an extent guidance and the way forward. And very important is that we have seen deepening inequalities and new divides, which are one of the most disturbing factors that come out through this crisis. I believe that those inequalities by far do not affect only education, you can observe them in the labor market, you can see them in many, many other areas of life. In any way, this crisis has been and is an opportunity for us to reset education and training for this digital age. And I think that this is why we have put forward what we believe is a more ambitious and coordinated effort. And this is where we invite everyone, including you to be part of it. And with this, I would like to move to the next slide. This slide has a QR code, which is handy because what you can do there is to find the documents which are behind this initiative. There are two of them, one communication, which is a shorter policy document and one stuff working document, which provides the evidence for the different actions. This will be explained by my colleague Veronica Mobilio in more detail. And I would like to also mention that since a few days, the action plan is available in all EU official languages. The action plan was adopted very recently, in fact, only three weeks ago on the 30th of September and has as a mental objective to foster high quality, inclusive and accessible digital education in Europe. Next slide please. Thank you. So this is the context that we are in starting from the left to the right. First of all, the importance of digital education is not really as high only since COVID but in fact was something that our new commissioner president or at least president since one year ago has put in her guidelines and has committed herself to in the form of a new digital education action plan, which we are now discussing. So this came before the crisis. Next to it is the very ambitious and concerted effort of the European Union to address the question of digital transformation and to talk about a Europe fit for the digital age. And this digital transformation, as all of you know, addresses all areas of life, but importantly now is also recognized at least at the EU level to include prominently education and training. This is very important because we operate in a field of subsidiarity, meaning that the competences in education and training lie with the member states and the European Commission is supporting those educational training systems, but we are not in any way defining or, let's say, creating any new curricula, etc, etc. Next point that you, Sandra, also mentioned is that we are not starting from scratch. We have already implemented to a great extent the first digital education action plan. And this is also where I would like to say that Eden has been part of the conversation right from 2018 onwards. But of course, what is also true is that COVID-19 has been a game changer and continues to be. And first and foremost, of course, showing the importance of digital education in particular in the modality of distance and online learning, but more generally bringing to the surface the questions which are coming with it and the question of preparation and readiness. Last but not least, what we have experienced is an unprecedented effort at the European level to help member states to recover and to build resilience out of the crisis. This is the last box that you see, icon here on the right side, which is called the next generation EU, which is an unprecedented effort at the EU level amounting to some 670 billion euros of grants and loans to support the recovery and resilience in member states out of the crisis. Let me just mention that 20% of this budget should go into the digitalization and we hope that a very big part of these funds will go into education and training because they are obviously one of the areas that need most attention. We can move to the next slide indeed and just briefly mentioned the very extensive stakeholder consultations that in fact also Eden was part of and you see here on the slide multiple screenshots because indeed many of it took place online. So we're all now familiar with this type of souvenirs, but indeed we started with some more physical conversations and then moved completely online. What you see here is a selection of some of the events with our Executive Vice President Margaret Westerger with our Vice President, Margaret Skeenas with our Commissioner Maria Gabrielle, but also for example with the chair of the European Parliament Committee for Education and Training Sabine Ferhayan. I am mentioning all these names because there is one point that I want to make here and this is that other than in the past the attention that has been given to digital education this time around is much more wide. It is much more encompassing the different areas of policies and indeed it speaks to the importance of the subject. What my colleague of course Veronica will tell you more about is also the open public consultation and some of the lessons learned. Suffice it to say here that we have received a huge number of contributions. 2700 around 130 position papers, but Veronica will tell you much more about the details. Now if we move to the next slide, what we are going to see is the guiding principles that we identified for the key aspects that we identified for the digital education action plan. And here I would like to stress that we are taking an integrated approach for technology use in education and training and digital skills. What this means is that we regard the subject of digital education, if you like, as one coin which has two parts. On the one side, it's the use of the technology in education which needs to be purposeful, pedagogically sound and safe. And on the other hand, we have the question of improving digital skills. We are going forward with the extension of the scope beyond formal education. This is very important because we are looking into lifelong learning now. I'm mentioning this because in the first iteration of the action plan, we have focused only on formal education. Then learning from the lessons in the last two and a half years, we are extending the duration of the action plan in order to align it better with the programming period of the EU. It's about being in sync with what is happening elsewhere in other policy areas. And something which is very important and I already touched upon it is the question that digital education becomes more and more a strategic priority for a Europe fit for the digital age. So in the same way that we are talking about digitalization of our societies or maybe of our economies, we are taking more and more interest and paying attention to the question of how this actually affects education and training. One very important aspect which I mentioned already is the recovery and resilience plans, which comes with the available budgets that the European Commission is putting forward. I mentioned it already. We're going to support the member states in their own strategies. There is no one size fits all. My home country, Bulgaria has different needs that the country that I work in etc. And this is where we're working together with the member states in order to define better what they need. Last but not least, we are proposing to have strong synergies between the different funding instruments. Now, if this sounds very technocratic, then it may well be because part of our mission is to make those people sensitive to the subject which take decisions. And I would like to move to the next slide and briefly introduce some of the more underlying principles of the digital education action plan, which are, if you like, explaining a little bit the rationale of what we are putting forward. First and foremost, I think the key objective here is to support high quality and inclusive digital education. And in fact, before the pandemic, digital education was something which was often a responsibility of a small team or a division in some educational institution or a ministry, not very rarely also slightly isolated maybe sometimes. Well, I think that the crisis is demonstrating that this is not a marginal issue, but it is something that should become center stage and should be a central component for learning teaching and assessment in the 21st century. Next is the issue of education in the digital age, and I think that transforming education for digital age is not something that can be outsourced or just delegated to the education ministry. No, this is a task for the society and needs to be including researchers, private sector, etc. Very important is to invest in connectivity equipment and organizational capacity, which are vital, because without them, basically no effective digital education can take place. And the same goes for teachers and trainers which need to be competent and confident users of technology. The important point is the question of digital literacy, which is essential, because it, in fact, enables, first and foremost, a better understanding of the digital world. So we are talking about computing education, computer science, informatics, but we're also addressing the question of advanced digital skills, which is a natural part of the skills needs, is more, as we know, needed, more and more needed for the digital transformation of the society and the economy. Last point is the question of high quality education content, and here what we have observed through the crisis, but also in the longer term, is that we need high quality education, digital education content in order to be relevant, in order to have high quality and inclusiveness of our education and training systems. Perhaps next slide. There are two key priorities of the digital education action plan. You see them in front of you on the one side developing a high performing digital education ecosystem. And secondly, it's about enhancing digital skills and competences for the digital transformation. As I said, I like to see this as the two parts of the same coin. And perhaps with this slide, we can move on to showing a little bit more what is behind each of them. So next slide. Under each priority, we have a number of limited actions. We are starting here with the first one, the first priority. And there what you see on this slide is a very compressed way of expressing the actions. But let me just mention a few of those. We have policy level actions which really target the member states because there is just so much that the EU can do, not only because of its size and limited competences, but also because the music, if you like, is playing at the level of the member states. So the first two actions are about enabling a strategic dialogue with the member states on factors for successful digital education, such as connectivity, teacher digital skills, infrastructure, stakeholder engagement. Or the second action, which is about working together with the member states on a council recommendation on online and distance learning for primary and secondary. Why on those two fields? Because we know that in higher education, distance learning is much more advanced in primary and secondary. It may well not be necessary also to be so advanced, but it definitely lags behind as we see from the data in multiple regions or member states of the European Union. Then action number three is about the need for high quality digital education content, which I have mentioned in here. In particular, we are thinking about the feasibility study around the possible European exchange platform. Why? Because we are considering how to create better synergies between existing platforms and also to perhaps enable more high quality digital education content creation. For which there are a number of quality criteria which are necessary. Not surprisingly, action number four is about supporting connectivity and making use of existing EU support for broadband investment for digital equipment and e-learning applications. And this is the context of the recovery and resilience plan. And perhaps moving to the next slide, we are going to see the last two actions in this field. First, the idea to support digital transformation in all sectors of education and training starting from primary, secondary, higher education, adult learning. This is not mentioned on the slide, but I am just mentioning it here. The idea is to support education institutions through Erasmus cooperation projects to develop their own digital transformation strategy. And linked to this is targeted support to teachers through the Erasmus teacher academies as well as the new upcoming online self-assessment tool for teachers, selfie for teachers. Some of you are familiar with the selfie tool. And then last but not least under this priority, the idea of how are we going to deal with the more and more, let's say, emerging role of AI and how we can develop ethical guidelines on artificial intelligence in teaching and training. Perhaps moving to the second priority is then the question, the question of what are the actions which are under the enhancing digital skills and competencies for the digital transformation. Well, here, obviously, as the priority is saying, we would like to promote the development of such skills and competencies, but what are we going to do concretely? Well, we're going to essentially support the competence development in the digital field in a number of different ways. First of all, creating guidelines to foster digital literacy and tackling disinformation through education and training. I will not go into detail of why this is important, but it is important to start very early and support our education and training systems. Then updating the digital competence framework, which my colleague if puny will also mention something about, and I think you are all familiar with the highly successful digital competence framework on which we want to further build on. A very important action is around the need to develop a European digital skills certificate or a way with which digital skills can be better transferred, if you like, between different constituencies or even perhaps legal regimes at some point. And similarly, what is important is that together with the member states, and this is why Action 10 Reads proposed a council recommendation on improving the provision of digital skills so that we work together with the member states because ultimately it is there where the responsibility lies on to expand the provision of digital skills in many different ways. And I don't really have the time to go into the detail on this, but happy to take any questions on that. Perhaps moving to the next slide and concluding on the second priority and I'm almost done is the need to first of all improve our cross national collection on data on student digital skills. I know that most of you are active in the research field. So I hope that you would agree that the situation in terms of the cross national collection of data when it comes to the student cohort is not optimal. And what we are thinking of is to introduce a relevant target for such a student digital competence based on the ICS study that could be expanded to as many member states as possible. Then we are proposing under action number 12 to expand the digital skills provision through our already ongoing digital opportunity traineeship. It is currently targeting higher education only we have seen that it is in high demand and would like to expand it to vocational education and training but also to educators and teachers to very important target groups that have so far not been covered. And what not least is the need to continue to address the persisting gender gap in STEM. And here we're proposing specific actions on how we can promote a better participation of female students in STEM fields together also in cooperation with the EIT. Moving to the last slide. I would like to mention that all of this requires stronger coordination and cooperation at the level. And we have been told this time and again in the last few months and we believe that this is a very important issue that we have to also address. This is why in the action plan we have proposed the creation of a European digital education hub which would have several different functions on the one side. It would bring excuse me a network of national advisory services that already exist. National advisory services on digital education in member states to exchange experience and to provide peer learning. Enabling them to talk about their recent experiences not only with COVID but also longer term and bringing them really for the for for now together. We would also think about monitoring the implementation of the action plan and sharing better and more focused the good practices from our ongoing projects but also by contributing to research. Third is the issue of how we can better bring the different sectors if you like researchers the private sector public sector education and training etc etc civil society how we can actually bring them together since many of them have a role to play in this new mode. And lastly would like to enable a more agile development of policy and practice and it is here where I would give the floor or pass over rather to Veronica thank you very much for your attention. Thank you Gary. Well it was music for my ears because I work here in Croatia as it serves as the via national coordinator for supporting high education institutions in learning. And sometimes we all think we are feeling like we are like Don Quixote finding fight fighting the windmills in a way that we do not get enough support from the ministry or from from the government in our work. And so I have a question for you before we go on what do you think how can a teacher researcher or for example institution working on this topic like supporting teachers and educators how they can contribute to realization of this new digital action plan. So I want to be very pragmatic here because I took a lot of time already for your attention. I would say by identifying what is interesting for you. I have taken the time to put forward 14 different aspects and you can actually further break them down. What is very important is that we identify first of all or you identify or the relevant institution or the relevant teacher the right interesting point or the research question or whatever it may be that is really the core interest. It could be disinformation. It could be how institutions manage digital transformation. It could be how to better cooperate with the private sector. There could be many different aspects. I think that this is the first step. The second very important step is that we let's say find out about this different interest and I think that this is a conversation that we do also because we would like to find out what is relevant for you as a stakeholders. But we are going to create in the future more opportunities on how to perhaps together address some of the problems that we identify. There could be different ways of doing this. There could be projects that support this through the Erasmus program. There could be perhaps events such as this where we can maybe discuss some of the questions. There might be other opportunities such as working groups that we would have to create and I could not go into this level of detail. But for some of these actions we're going to do that set up working groups and in fact you are part of Delta the Delta working group. So you know more or less that part of the question. So let's start by identifying what is the right angle for your interest and then reaching out to us. I think that our commitment is that we are listening to you and that we together as much as possible define the answers to the questions. Thank you. Okay so let's go further in a way so that we are able to hear everyone and we will have questions in the end. We already have some questions but now I'm giving floor to Veronica to give the part regarding the research that was done in order to prepare the new digital education action plan. So Veronica please floor is yours. Thank you so much. I hope you can hear me well. So hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be here and thanks for the opportunity. Indeed I'm going to talk about the research that fed in the preparation of the digital education action plan. So if we move to the next slide. As Georgie said the communication on the digital education action plan was published together with a staff working document. Now what is a staff working document. I like to describe it as a sort of research paper that provides evidence and background information for the actions that are suggested in the communication. This was done by using research and policy documents published in the last two years but also specific data from existing data sets as the SE, Eurostat, ICL sensor, etc. And also through extensive stakeholder extensive input received by stakeholders that we consulted in preparation of the initiative, including through an open public consultation. And now today I decided to focus on the OPC on the open public consultation because even though we cannot consider the results representative of the European population and the European member states. They are very useful to actually confirm few things that we see emerging from research ongoing research on the topic. So let's move to the next slide. Here you can find the sort of overview of the OPC replies. Georgie said that we got 2700 replies. These are from 60 countries. People could reply in a personal capacity or on an organizational capacity. So the majority of them replied on a personal capacity and then the majority of people in this case were educators and parents. Of course, on the other side between those that replied on an organizational capacity, the majority of them were education and training institutions. This to give you a sort of overview of who replied to the OPC. In the next slide, you find the recap of the main findings of the OPC that I think they were already well described by Georgie. In terms of describing the situation that we saw happening in many countries when it comes to the COVID-19 crisis and lockdown periods. Parents were overwhelmed, learners were missing face to face, interaction and guidance, educators were struggling due to low capacity of their institutions. The situation was not positive. This comes out very clearly from the OPC, but there is a positive side and the positive element is that many of the respondents saw the crisis as a turning point as something really having a long term impact on education and training. And the quotes that I put here on the right in the low part of the slide, I think it's very nice because it says it very nicely why we suggested an integrated vision for digital education in education and training. If we go to the next slide. Here I put these three charts, which are about the use of online and distance learning before, during and post, post among brackets, the COVID-19 crisis. So we can see on the left that 95, 59% of respondents said that they didn't use online distance learning before the crisis. The use of online and distance learning increased largely during the crisis and the data that we collected through the OPC say and confirm that their use is likely to increase also in the future, at least to a certain extent. Here also there is a very interesting funding when it comes to trying to understand what type of distance and online learning was used during the crisis, because what we see is that the use of real time, so which means life classes increased more than the other type. The one on one on time, even though the use of prerecorded classes and online learning materials was used more before the crisis. So this seemed very interesting to us because it somehow confirms that when education and training institutions closed, the most feasible solution was the one of transposing the lessons online and trying to keep the learners engaged by delivering to them online classes. So that is very interesting to us. In the next slide you can find another very interesting funding. We asked the respondents to actually tell us what they thought about the measures that were implemented at national level. You can see from the charts that the majority of the people were happy about the measures. They considered them successful, but actually when you go deeper to try to understand who said what, we found a very big discrepancy between education and training staff and parents and learners, with the first ones being way more positive than the others. So somehow the crisis helped educators to get to know digital education and to use it, and somehow they are also happy about what they managed to do considering the situation. But on the other side, learners and parents struggled a lot throughout the process. There are also a few other interesting elements when it comes to the success of the measures, which are related. The first point that I wanted to make is that the satisfaction appears to be higher at the higher education sector, confirming somehow that there was a higher level of preparedness in online and distance learning. And the second element is that the OPC results confirm that vocational education and training was the education sector that somehow struggled the most in ensuring continuity of education and training. In the next slide, this is actually also very interesting. So it's about what people needed during the crisis and they didn't get. So what you find here is the most selected element by each target group. If you go through the table, you can see that there is a very nice parallelism between learners and parents and education and training staff on the other side. Learned parents basically focused on interaction and guidance that they were really missing. While on the other side, education and training institutions focused much more on the enabling factors, especially from a technological point of view. So they mentioned very often connectivity and infrastructure as something that was really a problem during the lockdown. The other interesting funding here is that when you look at the second most selected element, support for mental health comes out across all target groups. This is something that we expected somehow, but to be honest, it was also a big surprise from the OPC. And it's something that's considering the ceiling going crisis. This is something that policy makers and stakeholders at the national level will need to look into in the future. In the next slide, here you can see the challenges for digital education in Europe on the right side. And then on the left side, the elements that allow education and training institution to improve the use of the digital technologies for teaching and learning. The challenges are the ones that basically Georgie mentioned, inequalities, infrastructure and connectivity, teacher training and skills, the lack of planning visions for digital education and the fact that online content available are not always high quality and addressing the needs of education and training institution. When it comes to the nabbling factors, the most quoted element is competencies of teachers. And this surprisingly comes even first, even before having a strategy and a vision for digital education. Then of course, other elements that are crucial are the resources available, the platforms that needs to be secure and ensuring connectivity and infrastructure to participants. You can see that from Georgie's presentation we tried to address all these elements in the new action plan and we will make our best to keep working on these elements in the best way possible. In the next slide, I think we go to the digital competencies. Here, not surprisingly, people in the OPC, participants of the OPC highlighted a lot the fact that the crisis increased somehow the importance of digital competencies. And particularly they stressed the importance of digital literacy as a key component of digital competence that everybody needs to have nowadays. So this is a very important funding that we found. The other important element is that 62% of participants declared that they believe that they improved digital skills during the crisis by teleworking and by using online and distance learning. But the key funding is that half of it of them desire wants to keep improving the digital skills in the future. So this is a very important funding and what makes it even more important is that this is particularly true for education and training staff. So educators and trainers, they really have learned throughout the process but they want to get better and to be better in the future. The other important funding on digital competence is that when you look deeper and try to understand what type of digital competence they would like to improve in the future, creating digital content, digital content creation comes out, which means that the crisis helped the educators understand that if they have to move to distance and online learning, they need to be confident in creating their lessons and customizing them and in using digital tools for, let's say, the learning process in a comprehensive way. While on the other side for learners and parents, the most important competencies relate to safety when navigating online and also protecting data and privacy. So there is a different perspective, let's say, between the different target groups. In the next slide, you can see a sort of rack up of what respondents said when it comes to the role of the European Commission and the European Union. Here, again, what is really surprising and really striking is that, again, support for teacher competence development is a leading area of support. It's the most important one. And then connectivity infrastructure, capacity building support, disadvantaged groups and quality of online core content come as following elements. But as Georgie said, I think the most transversal element that we can see really clearly emerging from the stakeholder consultation that we have been running since March until the very end, is the need for more cooperation across different stakeholders. This is a very important funding and it is the reason why we suggested the creation of the European Digital Education Hub. And if we go to the next slide, I would like to stress that actually this was also one of the findings of one of the specific stakeholder consultation that we have been running in preparation of the action plan. Back in August, in cooperation with the Joint Research Center, we organized a research workshop engaging researchers from different member states working on investigating the impact of COVID-19 on education and training. We had an online session, of course, and a very interesting discussion to try to understand what is that we know and what is that we don't know and we should know in the future. And outcomes of that conversation are very important because, again, the need for cooperation came up very strongly. And in particular, researchers stressed the need for better links between the research on one side and the policymaking on the other side, which means that we are very much aware of the need to open this dialogue, including the research community, which is, from our perspective, a very important stakeholder to include in the dialogue around digital education. And the other key element that came up very strongly from the participatory workshop with researchers is the need for further research looking into the future of education and training, which is actually what EAVS is going to present in a few minutes. If we move to the next slide, I am over with my presentation. I hope that I did manage to stay in the minutes that I was given. But I wanted to say that if participants in this webinar want to know more about the OPC results and the stakeholder consultation in the staff working document, there is an annex dedicated to it. But most importantly, we recently published a new report co-authored with the Jersey, who supports us in analyzing the replies to the OPC. And this report is really about the fundings, a very deep analysis of the fundings of the OPC. And I put here a link where you can actually access it because it's not in the same page of the communication and the staff working document. So I only thought that it might be useful for participants to have the reference on that. So that's from my side. Thank you, Veronica. Very good. The points, I think that the numbers, the percentage show that really high relevant things that we should put focus on. And maybe this discrepancies between educators and learners and parents on the other side. It's very important to see how each of them is looking to the education as such, you know, from different points of view. So this is something definitely we should put focus on more so that we all have the same idea and get the satisfaction how actually a digital education should look like. I'm certain that the majority of teachers have been doing online teaching in a way as emergency remote teaching. So definitely the definition of online education and online teaching and learning was different between teachers and learners. So, yeah, maybe just one question for you. Is there any overlap between this action plan and European Union Green Deal in terms of resilience and recovery? Because the Tessa Finch is asking, she feels there are so many opportunities here to align on capacity building. Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, there is an overlap in the sense that these are two very politically important objectives. And of course, fostering digital competence development means also contributing to the green transformation. So we need to work on the two pillars in synergy to make sure that there are the two objectives to reinforce each other. And actually, this is also what we have envisaged for the digital education action plan. Thank you. Let's move on now to Eve. So, Eve, what is Joint Research Centre preparing for us now? Hello. Good afternoon. Thank you, Sandra, and thank you, Aiden, for organizing this webinar. Thank you, also colleagues and everybody to be present today. So, okay, I'll try to be short because we are running out of time. As Sandra said, what I will try to do is very briefly and also my colleague Veronica and Georgie also mentioned that actually we are the GRC. We are part of the in-house research laboratory of the European Commission. We provided a lot of support and analysis to the digital education action plan, a lot of evidence, a lot of research analysis behind it. And we are working very closely together with them to actually provide as much as possible the good and most recent evidence to back up their digital education action plan. And actually you can find that as Veronica said in the staff working document where you find a lot of references to studies and analysis. Of course, not only to our own research, but obviously also to very good research which was provided by colleagues outside of the GRC. Next slide. But what I will very briefly present to you and actually this list of the GRC recent publications. These data and analysis has actually also already been taken into account in the DEAP. And just briefly to share with you because I structured them in related to COVID-19 related to research. Then the DEAP priority one related to the high performing dislocation systems and the DEAP priority two on the digital skills and competences. And you see there a number of studies. First of all, related to COVID, obviously it was very difficult in the beginning to get already data on what was happening during the school closures and the shift to digital online learning. So what a number of researchers did, we but also others is taking existing data sets such as PISA, PURLS, TALIS, EUROSTAT and try to reflect and use the existing data sets from the past to try to understand what kind of risks and challenges and opportunities we were experiencing during the school closures. And obviously it was also already mentioned by Veronica, the educational inequalities have been really confirmed in these and other studies. I mean access to infrastructure, access to devices, but also psychological support. We all see a lot of evidence that actually those families with lower socioeconomic background have been struggling much more than other families to survive during the COVID school period. And that is certainly something we need to address and you find evidence there. And also related to priority one, we actually very recently released a couple of weeks ago a study report on emerging technologies and the teaching profession, looking at developing near future scenarios on how the teachers profession is changing to the use of these technologies and actually trying to raise some of the ethical and pedagogical concerns that are also mentioned in the disability education action plan. This relates for example to who takes the pedagogical decision, the algorithm or the machine versus the teacher or the educator. And we developed there the notions of teacher in the loop, teacher over the loop to understand when the teacher should be involved and when not. For example, in lower stakes educational decisions, the algorithm can take decisions, but when their high stakes decision to be made, then obviously teacher or pedagogical decision needs to be made by a human and not by the machine. In relation to digital competences, we released also two reports on the combat work with a selection of case studies and also with an implementation guide. Next slide. Then maybe more interesting what's upcoming. We will release a number of two new reports. Still this year, a qualitative study to understand how but then real evidence from what happened during the last months on the impact of the shift to digital learning during the confinement, qualitative analysis in five year member states. And we also conducted a survey of families and children in 11 countries asking them about their experiences and there also reports will be released at the end of the year. Related to the high performing digital education systems, you know, of course, there is a selfie. Selfie was mentioned in the first digital education action plan. This is to be continued, but it is not as such renewed as a new action because the action is already there, but it is still to be continued supporting schools with their digital capacity. We're going to release a report together with the European Training Foundation with experiences from lessons learned on how selfie can be used to improve the digital capacity of schools. We also in Spain have a representative analysis of selfie results, which we're going to release later the year. We do also more psychometric analysis, looking at specific analysis, for example, teacher collaboration and students digital competences. Also look at try to get some evidence on if there is a policy intervention, how does it affect the school's digital capacity and use of selfie. So there are a number of studies we're going to release there as well. There is one on educational technologies in China and their implications for COVID. Actually, this should be the first batch, which and the lessons for Europe, which we want to release also still on November. And then we also have, as I think many of you know, we have the Discom EDU self reflection tool out there. And we're going to release various publications on the results, analyzing the results from the use of the self reflection tool. Also for higher education there, for example, in Spain, we work together with crew directors universities from all universities in Spain, and also Mitaret, which is the Latin American, the Spanish speaking universities all over the world, where we collaborate with them. And we want to release also still this month or next month in November reports with the outcome of the outcome self reflection pilot we did. So this was targeted to individuals and we will have a methodological guide and an item bank, which is fully developed with the psychometric analysis. So we want to release that report as well. Next slide. And that's what that will be the last one. So you see I can be very brief. Obviously, we will continue the COVID related research because this is here for the moment, unfortunately, still to stay. We will do continuous analysis of the impact of COVID on learning on the shift to digital learning and obligatory schooling. We also participating in a study together with UNESCO and the EAA, which was to do a survey on educational disruption survey. In addition, we continue developing as selfie for teachers is now mentioned as one of the actions in the new digital education action plan. We are going to do a full pilot to develop a self reflection instrument and the fully again do full validation on the basis of psychometric analysis. We are going to release also a selfie module for work based learning and on the existing selfie, which very soon in less than 10 days will celebrate its second year. We're doing several analysis, text mining of the qualitative data, a qualitative impact study we're going to do also feasibility for account of factual impact analysis to see the impact of selfie on schools digital capacity. We also going to launch a study on computational thinking and obligatory schooling in Europe. And then finally, we're also going to work and start the work now very soon on the development of a new version of DIGCOM. So the version DIGCOM 2.2, which we will update, especially dimension for the examples of knowledge skills and attitudes to also take into account artificial intelligence, disinformation, all the new kind of trends and also COVID experiences that we've been experiencing to update somehow the DIGCOM framework and to make and to use more recent examples to demonstrate that the framework is still future proof. And we're also going to collaborate on this new initiative, which is mentioned, the European Digital Skills Certificate. And there was actually one question raised in the question and answer. Someone asking, what is this European Digital Skills Certificate and how it's going to look like? Well, I can already reply saying that actually that is exactly what we're going to research and investigate. So this is not yet defined. This is not yet set. But the coming year will be used to do analysis to look at our existing certification schemes work and then propose different scenarios of the development of such a European Digital Skills Certificate, or at least a way to recognize and to enable to facilitate the cross-border recognition of digital skills certificates because that we observed that there is a need for that from stakeholders. So you see quite a full agenda. That is, of course, from the GRC side, from our side. There's, of course, much more to study and to do also just looking at the data, looking at the 14 actions and especially looking also at the staff working document. You see there's much more room and need still for much more analysis to understand what works under which conditions for which target groups and what doesn't work. So we still need to improve that evidence-based and we will work on that at the GRC. But of course also with all relevant research institutes outside of the GRC, with Eden, with other networks, I mean, because we, of course, in a definite need to get good evidence, good analysis to improve the digital education and the digital skills in Europe. And with that, I would like to thank you for your attention. Thank you. Thank you. If really high number of activities, you are busy as always. I see very good news about this number of reports and the issues that you will be researching. Eden is, of course, always here to help in research, but also in dissemination of the results and helping to gather people and community to participate. So we have a number of questions at the moment. I'm opening now the floor for the questions. Maybe I will start the questions from this point of view. I have asked something at the beginning, but for example, we have two questions. One is from Vlad Mihayscu, who says, are you and European Commission planning to send this plan directly to policymakers, government and parliament, helping putting these decision factors in contact with experts in the field who could help locally in each country? Because there are many cases of lacking communication between these two sides and which is also contributing. The second question, are there any plans to give support to digital strategies in development? So basically, the European Commission has adopted this digital education plan. It's here, it's open. How to communicate to the member countries that this is not only stayed on high level, but also go to top down. So Georgi, maybe this is a question for you. Yes, thank you Sandra. I think the question of what Mihayscu is very pertinent because it's a problem that many big organizations have in terms of communicating externally. What we are going to do is that we are going to present this action plan to the member states. In fact, we have already done this in the format that we work in Brussels with the people who are responsible for education and training, which are those that come from the ministries. And we are doing this not only once, but we are doing this multiple times because the level of detail that they request is much different than what we have been able to cover today. So we are indeed doing this. In fact, tomorrow morning we are doing exactly this over three hours. So this is not going to be sufficient, though, and we are going to have a more, I would say, wide-ranging communication around the action plan. We will communicate through the ongoing, let's say, channels that we have through the Erasmus channels, but also through the future activities. I have mentioned that one of the ideas through the European Digital Education Hub is to bring the different stakeholders together because I think it is very important that we reach out to those stakeholders that are not necessarily part of the policymaking process but are directly affected by it or can contribute much more. I think that we are in exactly such a domain that we should reach out. So yes, you are absolutely right. We need to communicate. And secondly, to the question of the digital plans and strategies, I have mentioned in one of the actions and I refer you to the action plan, the support to digital transformation plans for all type of education institutions, primary, secondary, higher and adult education institutions that will be supported through Erasmus cooperation projects from 2021 onwards in their digital transformation plans. And this is a very broad subject. So there will be a lot of opportunities for education and training institutions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for this answer. Very good. This is very important, the communication part. I think it's highly appreciated because basically only via communication we can get things spread further. Okay, thank you. Let's move to the next question. Maybe Veronica here can answer. We have a question from Maya Queen. She's asking regarding the European Digital Education app. How can an organization get involved to get and share good practices? Where we can keep track on news about this? This is a very hot question, I would say. We can confer. Yes, you can pass it. Thank you Veronica. You heard that it is hot, which means that it is very, very important for us. No, but coming back to your question. So I think that this is one of the brand new and let's say ambitious ideas of this action plan. And this is going to be very much work in progress. So what you can do in terms of keeping track on the news because this is your question. First of all, on finding out what is happening is to stay in touch with some of the channels that we use. For example, the EU Digital Education Twitter channel where we communicate on all our activities related to the action plan. So I invite you to use that channel at EU Digital Education. More generally, what we plan to do is to build up activities gradually over next year. And next year to be able to come out with also a website which would be featuring the different activities that are related to the Digital Education Hub. But first line of communication I would say would be our social media channels just to find out what is happening. Stressing that this is very, very open process and it is very much work in progress. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I want to address myself as well question but we have also one question related to the open access and open education resources. As mentioned in the digital education plan, it says high quality and inclusiveness of educational content. It didn't go further. I was reading the digital education plan but I didn't find that open education and open access is mentioned there. What so do you think, did you plan to push this as well as importance of open education in terms of quality and the accessibility to everyone? So who is willing to answer this question? I can start maybe with some remarks and if my colleagues would like to mention other aspects now. The open education resources issue is not new for us and we have been strongly advocating this since the opening up communication for example. This is seven, eight years ago. So I don't think we should be repeating things that are let's say already on our agenda. But more generally to the question of content. I think that what we are promoting here is not closed or open systems. We're promoting a level playing field where choice is available and where the question of effective and open and inclusive platforms can be decided by the needs in fact. So we're not saying that one is better than the other. One platform is better than the other. What we are saying and I think that we are also saying this in the evidence that there are positive aspects to the different ways of addressing this. It is very important that we acknowledge the strong network effects of existing platforms. We cannot ignore the fact that all let's say five leading platforms for online education are outside of the EU. We cannot just make it unhappen because we just want. So I think it's important to acknowledge also that part of the discussion and of the strong network effects that are taking place in digital economy and in particular in online digital education platforms. So we are taking a careful approach not advocating one or the other. But we are definitely in strong support of open education resources. I can say less about open software itself because that's not really our cup of tea here. But when it comes to open education resources we have said that in the opening up education. We are strong supporters of open standards of inclusiveness and we believe that you know transferability compatibility of content is very very important. It's just that this may be achieved sometimes by different means. Yeah good. Maybe maybe if you can continue because looking at the all these things you plan to do in research. Did you plan to perhaps to investigate how much open education has been used used last six months since the lockdown and open educational resources has this number increased. And did people in the situation when they have locked down went for open education resources as a way of learning. Or if this was the perhaps the way to compensate the formal education which was at that moment highly questionable in a way of producing. Yes thank you Sandra definitely know we in the qualitative study we are taking we obviously are looking at content we're looking at available learning resources and obviously we're also looking at availability of open content. The ability to share and reuse it as well if that's the case. So this is part of the of the template of questions that we are that we have developed you know to do the research. So obviously we will take into account it's not an exclusive focus on open education on all yards. But when we look at content it is part of the discussion of course and we hope to be able to to also bring some results related to that as well in our research. I just wanted to to mention that actually in the results of the OPC we see very clearly a key role that the presence of open educational resources played during the crisis. Two are the elements that respondents mentioned to actually a light when the situation was managed better. And the two elements are the presence of a strategy and plans for digital education within the institution and then the use of the institution of open educational resources. So indeed they played a key role during the lockdown and the use of digital education in that field. Thank you very much very useful. Maybe going back to you the the relation between DigiComp and the checking tool and the selfie project for teachers. What is the difference or relationship between these two projects? It may be confusing for teachers. Yes, I can understand. So this is a bit of a technical question but I'll try to clarify briefly. So what we developed in the beginning as a kind of an experimental project. What was we called the DigiComp a do a check in tool which was available. It is still available for all education sectors primary secondary higher education lifelong learning. And actually the second self reflection tool is quite well used. I think we have more than 40,000 responses already almost 50,000 from all over the world. So but that was and still is as we call it an experimental first trial based on the DigiComp a do framework. Now what we're now doing is actually revising the items and the questions and also now fully piloting and testing it. And also checking all the psychromatics, the reliability, the validity, discrimination analysis. So actually to ensure that when we then come up with a new tool which will then be revised checking will be the selfie for teachers. But that will then be a version fully tested, fully piloted. And that's a difference with the checking to the checking tool was an experimental tool, but it raised so much interest that is actually quite widely used. But actually we were never able to fully validate and test it. So that's the difference. We're now going for a fully validated and tested tool for school educators. And that's why we call it selfie for teachers. And then in the meantime, at the later on, if we have time and available resources, a similar process can be done for higher education. Because there also we see, you know, big interest from higher education institutions from all over the world also within Europe for the for developing obviously the digital competence of educators. Thank you. Thank you. We are coming to the end of our session the already exceeded the planned time, a number of questions. I have left the smaller one to not to be answered. Maybe if you have a willing and time now to just provide short answers in Q&A. What is definitely important that at this moment, visual education education action plan have to be communicated to all stakeholders quite widely in a way that it doesn't reach only the ministries, but it also reach the other stakeholders engaged and participating in education and training in their countries. And definitely, I would like to congratulate you for coming up with this digital education action plan in such times when we had the COVID pandemic working against that. But at the same time, it was, I would say, like incentive to make a shift to make transition, you know, some of us have been working for 15 years on some things. And then overnight come pandemic and make it happen you so so well take advantage of the situation. Thank you very much for your participation. Thank you very much for finding time to be with us today. I think that we provide the number of answers, but definitely we are looking into European digital skills certificate very interesting thing. I will am certain that it will be a highly recognized and interested among all of us and definitely digital education hubs as a space for collaboration and sharing know how we would all like to engage there and collaborate. So looking forward to this item especially. So thank you again for being with us today. Bye. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye. And thank you very much. Goodbye.