 Okay, there you go, Alex. All right, thanks very much. So good afternoon everyone. I hope you are ready for our session. This is an early start to the OER conference this year. And it's interesting to see how this format pays out. It looks like we're going to be a small and cosy team of people, a few participants. So we might not need to do breakout activities. We might just work as a whole, but we'll see when the time comes. So I'm Alexander Mikriganidis. I'm a research fellow at the Open University in the UK. And I'm working mainly on research projects that have to do with technology-enhanced learning, with personalized learning, with lifelong learning, open educational resources. And lately I've also been working on decentralization and blockchain technologies on education. Right, I think we can start. This will be hopefully a participative session, so I'll not spend a lot of time talking through slides. I'll just make a brief introduction of about what this session is, the general purpose, the general context of this work. And then we'll have some time to do an activity together, to build a learning scenario using some of the elements of blockchain technology and decentralization. There will be plenty of time for discussion on this scenario and then we'll close this session. So first of all, a few words about the overall context of this work. So this is, I'm here together, I'm here today on behalf of the Quality Chain Project. I'm wearing my European Horizon 2020 hat. This is a three-year project funded by the Horizon 2020 program and it's currently in its third and final year. So within this project we are investigating how we can manage, award and verify qualifications for education or employment qualifications on the blockchain in a decentralized manner, so that we can essentially empower learners to acquire complete control over their learning process and help them with tasks like a progress their learning path, acquire a job post, a specific job position, scout the job market and use decentralization blockchain technologies to their advantage. We are a consortium of 10 partners and we have not only universities but also some public sector agencies in Greece and in Portugal where we investigate how we can use these technologies, blockchain technologies and the decentralization paradigm in the public sector for recruiting, for example, public servants and making the whole recruitment process transparent and immutable. So the project is investigating for key areas. So we are working on pilots in order to engage external communities, external stakeholders and acquire their feedback on our approach and on our platform and tools. So we are specifically working on pilots on the domains of lifelong learning, on smart curriculum design. This is about adapting the curriculum within higher education, different curricula within higher education to address the needs of students and also the current job market trends. We are also, as I mentioned before, we are also working on public sector staffing, recruitment for the public sector and finally we are also doing pilots on HR consultancy and competency management services. So the pilot which I am personally leading and mostly invested in has to do with lifelong learning. So within this pilot we are working on providing lifelong learners. These are learners that pursue learning throughout their lifetime for either personal or professional purposes. And through this project and by using blockchain technologies we want to do three things. We want to offer them transparent and mutable accreditation. We also want to offer them personalized recommendations about jobs that may interest them, that will help them progress their careers and also about courses that will offer them the suitable skills to achieve their learning goals. And finally, overall, we want to support lifelong learners in their personal and professional progression. So the main stakeholders we are working with are obviously lifelong learners. As I mentioned before, these learners are not confined to a particular level of education or mode of education. They pursue learning throughout their lifetime. They may engage in either formal or informal learning or both depending on their circumstances and their learning goals, what they want basically to achieve. So educational institutions is the second type of stakeholder we are liaising with in order to understand their needs when it comes to supporting the best ways to support lifelong learners. And educational institutions they provide educational training services. We are looking into paid ones, paid training and education services or free, for example MOOCs and open educational resources. So we are, in general, these are the main stakeholder groups we are working with in order to better understand their needs and how to address this through this pilot. So this is the main use case we are looking into. We can see at one side we have the lifelong learner and on the other side we have the educational institution. So basically it's a very simple scenario we are showcasing the use of smart badges. So the lifelong learner pursues their learning goals by studying online courses and they are awarded with digital smart badges upon completion of online courses. So these smart badges are blockchain based and they offer first of all immutable and instantly verifiable accreditation through the blockchain. Actually it just occurred to me that I've been talking about the blockchain but I haven't really mentioned what a blockchain is. I'm sure a lot of you will be already familiar with the general concept. I'm not going to go, it's not the purpose of this session to go into details of how we are using the blockchain but you can for the purposes of this session you can imagine the blockchain you can understand the blockchain as a distributed ledger a distributed database across the internet a database that is not centrally controlled by one entity but it's distributed across different nodes and different machines and basically what it does is apart from taking apart from decentralizing control it also offers an immutable record of the data of its data. So the smart badges that we are storing on the blockchain are immutable and can also be instantly verified and this can happen even if the institution that awarded the badge no longer exists for example it may have merged with another institution it may have changed its name it may have transformed into something different but the smart badge will always be immutable and instantly verifiable the other thing we are doing on top of smart badges is offer personalized recommendations about jobs and courses so the smart badge includes the key skills that the learner has acquired so based on these skills we can offer matching services with different what is available in the job market what is advertised in terms of job positions and also we can offer courses recommendations for courses that will help the learners progress acquire additional skills on top of the ones they have already acquired so this is in the next couple of screens you can see some mockups of what these recommendations look like so in this screen you can see on the top half there is a map that basically shows that the jobs are available to the learner and this can be filtered based on the preferences of the user based on the location and these are full match these are jobs that fully match the skills of the learner on the bottom half of the screen we have recommendations for jobs that are a partial match to the learner the skills that the learner has acquired so for these for these jobs the learner can the learner receives also recommendations about courses that will offer him for him or her the missing skills so if they have if they are missing for example data mining skills they will be offered a set of for a particular job they will be offered a set of courses that will help them acquire this skill right so I've been working with different communities of stakeholders doing some consultation workshops in the past couple of years in order to elicit requirements from groups of learners educators researchers and practitioners and I have been going to major educational technology conferences like the ALT conference or the open education global conference in order to sit down and talk to these different groups these different stakeholders and understand and acquire requirements about about this approach about supporting lifelong learners not only within not only within the specific scope of decentralization and the use of blockchain technologies but also on the general premise of facilitating lifelong learning and addressing the understanding the main challenges and obstacles that the lifelong learner faces so in this next slide you can see some of the findings some of the major findings from this consultation exercise so far so I have grouped those in four main themes so in the first theme we have immutable formal qualifications we have according to this requirement the learners lifelong learners should have should aggregate in their portfolios both formal and informal qualifications which can then be validated by employers and also educational institutions so the need to recognize not only formal but also informal learning achievements is quite prominent the second theme has to do with lifelong learning pathways and specifically with micro credentials so we have a very strong need for lifelong learners to receive guidance and scaffolding on building their learning pathways and specifically acquiring flexible accreditation for example micro credentials these are quite prominent these days especially during these challenging times because of the pandemic which has resulted in a crisis in education and also in the job market things are quite fluid in the job market and as a result job seekers and lifelong learners need to acquire access to flexible accreditation in order to acquire quickly and efficiently the key skills that will help them improve their position in the job market or enter or even enter the job market the third theme is also quite relevant to the second this has to do with career cancelling and specifically with comprehensive with the need to provide job seekers with a comprehensive overview of the job market and also the latest market trends and finally the fourth theme has to do with data ownership and privacy and specifically about enabling learners to own their digital identity and their portfolio data and also being able to control third-party access meaning who can access their data in what ways they can access their data and for how long so for example if you are applying for a specific job you may not need to make your whole portfolio available but specific parts that are relevant to the job and also for a specific time span so within this project within the quality chain project we are doing this exercise to understand the overall needs and challenges faced by lifelong learners and we are looking particularly to address specific aspects of these needs and help them overcome specific obstacles. For example with the use of blockchain technologies we can offer them access we can enable them to take control over their data and control privacy and ownership over this data with the as I mentioned before with the use of blockchain technologies you can also offer instant verification of academic credentials and with job recommendations job and course recommendations we are looking into how we can provide some scaffolding and guidance to lifelong learners. Right so I'm going to pause here for a moment I understand this might be a lot to take in but I think this is a good moment to pause reflect and answer any questions you may have you can either write your questions in the chat or you can raise your hands and unmute yourselves and voice your questions so I can see in the chat that we have participants from different parts of the globe Manchester Victoria British Columbia University of Oklahoma and Qatar so great we have a nice mix of time zones and weather I'm located I don't know if I mentioned it earlier I'm located in Milton Keynes in the UK and it's currently quite nice and sunny and warm which is not very usual but looks like spring is finally coming right and we have someone from Yorkshire great so Clint you want to ask a question go ahead hi yes so I have a question I'm just wondering it's not really related to your pilot but I noticed that one of the pilots you talked about for your project was around smart curriculum design and I'm wondering if you can I know it is not part of your project but can you tell us a little bit about what that entails and how blockchain is being used for smart curriculum design so thanks for the question and I love your mic setup it looks very professional so basically, essentially within this pilot we have a higher education institution based in Athens Greece this is the National Technical University of Athens who are looking into how they can adapt their curriculum based on the by doing mining of the skills currently needed in the job market and at the same time mining also the skills recorded on the learning achievements of their students in order to find matches and in order to review basically their offered courses their offered the skills they offer to better match to better address basically any trends that appear in the job market I can also see there is another question by Adam in the chat how would the take up be encouraged if there is a risk that some may be left behind this is a very valid concern and I have been asked this in other conferences and in other events it is so the technology is here basically to be used by anyone we are trying basically to lower the threshold and to allow anyone with for example a smartphone to have a personal what we call a data store a pod on their phones that basically is their a personal portfolio that they control and they allow access third-party access to it so in a sense this is about democratizing education in order to take some control from educational institutions that are the sole provider of basically credentials and everything there will still be awarding formal qualifications but we also want to empower communities of learners to do peer assessment and peer award of qualifications for informal in informal context for example so in this way we want to in this sense we are actually going towards the way of democratizing education democratizing lifelong learning offering wider access and greater control to lifelong learners and hopefully improving inclusivity improving addressing the social aspects of lifelong learning and I can see there's another question also from Adam about the advantages of smart badges over current open badges so as I mentioned before the main advantage is that you can use you don't need to have when you I'll give you a very simple example when you apply to a job the employer will not need to contact the university the university that has awarded you a degree to check to verify that the degree is valid but which can take weeks but with the smart badge they will be able to instantly verify that this is a this is a valid degree, this is a valid qualification so this is one very simple example of actually reducing the time the recruitment time to a great extent and as I mentioned before this also comes in handy for example if you're the university that has awarded you a degree no longer exists they have transformed into a different entity they have merged with a different university for example and that would make things a lot more complicated and a lot more lengthy and requiring more time and effort to complete the verification process any other comments or questions obviously will have to be more there will be more opportunities to discuss these issues in our in our activity right now we can I think we can move to our group activity which is about building a learning scenario specifically for supporting lifelong learning and since we are we are not such a huge group I was initially anticipating I was planning for having separate breakout groups but since we are not that many around I think we can keep it within the main room and discuss and keep the discussion going within a single group so the you can see here I have set up an external tool called Myro to basically simulate the kind of interaction we would have if we were to do this activity face to face on a board using stickers so what I would like you to think about is different aspects of a learning scenario and how this and how within this learning scenario the elements of blockchain and decentralization can be used to address specific requirements or address specific needs of learners so but the scenario does not have to be exclusively about blockchain decentralization it can be generally about lifelong learning or open education and different types of technology that can be used to facilitate this to facilitate this scenario and address requirements so I have I have created a board which I can share which I can show you the live version of this board in a minute yes I can share my screen so you should be able to see my screen right now so we have basically four areas the first one is about the personas who are the typical users in this scenario and what do they wish to accomplish the second area is about the requirements what does a persona from this scenario wants to to do so that they achieve specific goal the third area has to do with the use of blockchain how do you envision the blockchain to be used can be used in this scenario and finally related sources is anything that you can think of any links projects or other resources that you think are might be relevant might might be useful to consider for this for this scenario so I can I would like to give the floor to you to start brainstorming your ideas and I'll be taking notes I'll be sticking I'll be doing the sticky notes on the on the board so the floor is yours you don't need to go through this specific sequence you can jump into any you can stick you can propose a sticker for any of these boards not necessarily with the order person requirements use of blockchain related sources anything that comes to mind feel free to write something in the chat or unmute and and speak out your idea so it's usually difficult to start with a blank canvas I can maybe start with proposing a persona for example a typical user that I am looking into quite with quite a lot of interest is the lifelong learner so I can write I like to include I can write some of their characteristics they wish they wish to get a promotion or a better job sticky note there so as yes so I can see some comments on the chat I am being silent because I was reading the chat I can yes I will the idea is that I can actually provide access to everyone to have a look and edit this this map this board so I am pasting the link into the chat so everyone so you can join in and I don't have to do all the work and but you will need to the only the only thing is that you will need to log in or create a free account a google using your google login for example to access this map I can see it has already joined so the so there is a comment from John about having adding the manager in a firm for either promoting or hiring lifelong learners so I'll add that to the map so I can see already some Debbie John and Sammy yeah have joined it's really cool to see the board being populated real time so you can while you are editing you can also unmute your microphones and share what you are doing I understand it might be a bit awkward to do this online it usually comes more naturally to do this face to face and discuss and have some conversations around this so I can see some sticky notes already on the board but feel free to jump in and share your thoughts as well so I can see we have a school or other credential granting agency added as a persona on the board that's good obviously we need this kind of this is the kind of stakeholders we are alluding to include in this scenario so what I'll do is give you some time to have a look to have a think and and stick and do your and populate write on some sticky notes and I'll come back in a few minutes yes some background music would be nice some elevator music would be nice it's quite amusing just to see everybody's little name flying about on the screen really isn't it it almost simulates this face to face interaction we would normally be having and this exercise a lot in physical in a face to face setting yes it's quite different obviously trying to do this trying to do this online it's not it's quite different basically yeah these are the main these are the main areas I would like our participants to to consider in order to specify this to provide a high level description of of a learning scenario from drawing from experiences drawing from not necessarily personal experiences but drawing from professional professional expertise as well the other thing I should mention the other thing I was planning to do during the session is provide you access to the actual a platform that is being built by the project which basically implements what I talked about the scenarios that I mentioned before about using smart and providing personalized recommendations to learners but unfortunately this is not possible to do this right now there is still the platform still under development I was hoping it would be early for an early it would be ready I was hoping it would be ready for an early access as a beta version today but looks like we will have to postpone that there is you can keep in touch with the project I have the the details in my last slide so you can have you can access it you can try it out as soon as it is launched it shouldn't be more than a few weeks time so unfortunately we will not be able to do a more practical session more practical exercise and try the the actual platform and and and get smart buds for your participation the plan was to have to award you to award participants with smart buds specifically designed for this session which would include the skills the blockchain and decentralization related skills related to this session but there will be there will be other opportunities to do that if you have for all the members there is an upcoming professional development series which which is already I think it's already kicked off it's already started and I will be doing a session next month around this work and hopefully by then there will be a live version of the platform will be available to try out and have a first-hand experience I mean that's really interesting obviously we're looking at open digital badges in alt just generally we're I noticed an interesting question that John has put on on one of the sticky notes because he's talking about what are the benefits of blockchain as compared to say LinkedIn for this type of use case of product and I suppose my own where I get confused is and I think Adam asked this question as well it was in relation to the differences between digital badges and then blockchain so how those kind of things fit together or maybe don't fit together so basically we're trying to build on top of open badges obviously we're reusing and extending the open buds specification but at the same time we're trying to we're trying to make to take advantage of what the blockchain has to offer in terms of immutability and instant verification and I can see there's a couple more questions from John that's in the chat what is the environmental impact of the blockchain this is a very good question because yeah the bitcoin blockchain is I agree it's environmentally terrible so we are using ethereum platform which is a bit better than the bitcoin blockchain and there's a few technical workarounds obviously we can't we can't take away this is the price of scalability with the blockchain the bigger it gets it doesn't scale great and it's not very good for the environment as well you have in terms of the processing power needed so there is a few workarounds and tricks I'm not a very technical I'm not very technical with with this I'm not I don't know exactly the details of this of these workarounds but there is a few things like I think it's called parity where you can actually offload there is and there is also the off-chain storage where you because it's quite pricey and quite processing it requires it's quite expensive in terms of processing power to put everything on the blockchain the idea is that you have that you store most of the data off-chain in IPFS in protocols like file systems that are distributed that are decentralized and put only hashes these are the key you can think of those as keys on the blockchain hashes that point to the external storage and the second question from Johnny is what are the controls for who gets to grant micro credentials or other information into the blockchain if anyone can grant a bud do we run into issues of having to constantly evaluate the credibility so this is this is a very good point these are great questions I agree with Debbie so you need to have of course you need to have different roles within the within the within the blockchain educational institution needs to be authenticated as an as an authority that can award a bud and of course the awarded bud will have a different say let's say a bud has been awarded by another learner so because the whole process and the whole record the blockchain record is transparent so you can anyone can see the criteria with which a bud has been awarded so obviously an employer will judge differently a bud that has been awarded for completing a higher education module compared to a bud that has been awarded by a fellow employee for example for a particular work related skill the key thing is that the criteria the awarding criteria for for awarding the criteria for awarding a buds are transparent and because they are on the blockchain they are immutable as well they can't be tampered with so I can see there is already a few sticky notes on the board I can see that you have mentioned requirements regarding managers needing to find someone with certain skills to hire or getting in the shoes of a lifelong learner wanting to take a MOOC to improve skills for a promotion in a particular sorry excuse me in a particular field and using the blockchain to query and see who has micro credentials that we are looking for these are all very valid these are all very valid comments so because we have we don't have a lot of time left as Debbie reminds us I'll get back to my slides I don't have much else to say let me go back to my final slide to basically give you the contact to show you how you can get in you can stay in touch so the project is finishing at the end of this year so until then we will be launching very soon launching our platform which addresses these main scenarios that I described so feel free to stay in touch through our websites our social media our newsletter to learn the latest the latest about this work and hopefully I should see some of you in some future events that I have planned within the ALT community for example in the professional development series that I mentioned before so thank you very much for joining this session I hope you have found it useful and let me wish you a good day and enjoy the rest of the conference thank you very much that's lovely thank you very much Alex that's really really helpful and I think we did lose a couple of participants towards the end there I thought that was really interesting I'd like to talk to you some more at some point about blockchain just to get my head around it a bit more but that was really great thank you so much really really good I'll just stop the recording now and then we can move on I'm not sure John is still with us I didn't know if John had any questions before I just stopped the recording any further ones maybe you don't have a mic John do no thanks all right no worries I'll just stop the recording now then