 Thank you indeed. All right, thanks very much, thanks Ikur. Welcome to this session. This will be about decentralizing open education using blockchain technology. This is the work I've been doing for the past few years, even before the quality chain project on investigating how blockchain technology can impact open education, how we can improve lifelong learning, how we can introduce decentralization within within open education, within lifelong learning, within accreditation and what are the implications for both lifelong learners and also educational institutions, educators and so on. So within this I will focus today mostly on the quality chain project, which is a European Horizon 2020 project, which is basically funding this work right now and is in particular funding several pilots within the European Union about introducing decentralization technologies, blockchain technologies in open education. So first of all I'll make a few words about the agenda today. So I won't keep you here for two hours. We should be done, we should be finished within one hour but of course I'll be available afterwards if there are any questions, if there are any discussions you want to have either on the platform, on the EG Connect platform or somewhere else. So first of all I'll do a brief introduction about what this work is about, what are the goals, objectives and what are the findings so far and then we'll have some time for you to get acquainted with the tools that we are building. We have a prototype platform that you can have a go at, try some of the budging technologies that we are experimenting with and then give me your feedback, your comments, your suggestions before and then we can close this and take up, move discussions to the OG Connect platform. So as I mentioned this work is funded by the European Project Quality Chain, this is a Horizon 2020 project, it started last year, it's about decentralizing qualifications and specifically investigating the verification and management of decentralized qualifications for empowering learners, re-engineering education and also transforming the public sector. So this is a consortium of 10 partners, we are mostly educational institutions, higher educational institutions from across Europe and also public sector agencies that do recruitment for the public sector in countries like Greece and Portugal. So this is essentially upon European network of universities and public sector agencies working together to investigate the potential of these technologies. These are the key areas where we are conducting pilots within Quality Chain, we have first of all lifelong learning where the Open University and me personally are engaged, I am leading this pilot on investigating how we can support lifelong learners through decentralized qualifications. Then we have another pilot on smart curriculum design investigating how we can help educational institutions make their offerings, their curriculum offerings more flexible and adaptive to ongoing changes in the job market and in the student's needs. Then there is of course public sector staffing which is a big part of the project as I mentioned before, we have public sector agencies working on this investigating how we can use blockchain technologies to verify degrees and make and speed up the process and also make more transparent the process of hiring for the public sector. And finally we are conducting also pilots in consultancy HR, consultancy and competency management services. So the lifelong learning pilot which I am leading on behalf of the Open University has to do with supporting lifelong learners throughout their journey so this doesn't this transcends higher education and we are supporting lifelong learners both within their formal education and also informal and we are doing this through blockchain based qualifications, decentralized qualifications that are transparent and immutable and on top of those qualifications we aim to provide learners with personalized recommendations about for example what to study next, what are their possible career steps in terms of positions available for them in the job market and generally scaffold their learning journey in order to basically help them in their personal and also professional progression. Right so these are the main stakeholders obviously we are targeting lifelong learners as I mentioned before they pursue learning throughout their lifetime for personal or professional reasons and also educational institutions these are the institutions that provide education or training services paid ones or free for example through open educational resources or massive open online courses and this is just a glimpse of the main use case we are considering so we have obviously the actors the lifelong learner and the educational institution and at the very center of it we have the personal portfolio of the learner which belongs to the learner they take it with them wherever they go even if they leave the educational institution a certain institution and go study somewhere else or engage into informal learning they have a persistent personal portfolio which contains all their learning assets this this is this portfolio is stored on the blockchain so it's immutable instantly verified and it contains recognition methods ways to recognize the the achievements of the learner for example through what we call smart badges so smart badges are based on the on open badges but the the key difference is that they are stored on the blockchain so they have immutability means that they cannot be tampered with so we make sure that we don't have fake credentials we don't have fake qualifications and they can be instantly verified so even if the imagine a situation which is very real which is very common to all of us an educational institutions institution awards a degree but then for one reason or another the institution itself seizes to exist it may emerge with another institution it may change it's a structure it may be a completely different organization or it may disappear however the degree will still be verified instantly on the blockchain so on top of the as I mentioned before we also want to not only award not only enable this decentralized accreditation through blockchain qualifications but we also want to on top of that on an additional level we want to support the whole lifelong learning journey so we want to provide recommendations about for example shootable job positions that the learner can apply for or learning pathways learning options either formal or informal learning pathways that someone can follow so to do that we are um uh we are storing on the um uh on smart bodies we have the we store the ski skills that someone has acquired uh which are then mined and then um uh and then recommendations are provided to learners about what to study next and or where to apply for uh which positions are suitable for them so in in this mock-up you can see some recommendations that we aim to offer to learners for example uh so on the top half of the screen you can see a map view of which positions are available these are full months these are positions that are full months to the skills that the learner has acquired and obviously on a map they can be filtered according to the location to be location specific and on the bottom half you can see the recommendations that are partial months to the skills that um that the learner has acquired and for those uh for those jobs that are partial months the learner can also get recommendations about the the learning materials about the courses that will help them um acquire those missing skills so so far what I have been doing is going around in major educational technology conferences including last years of an education global conference in Milan which feels like it was ages ago a lifetime ago um and I've been running consultation workshops uh where I have been eliciting requirements from uh different groups of learners educators researchers practitioners from the open educational and also from the educational technology community uh so here I can summarize some of the findings from this consultation exercise um so essentially these four major themes have emerged the first thing has to do with immutable and formal with immutable formal and informal qualification so uh this is uh it's important that e-portfolios should aggregate both formal and informal qualifications which can then be validated by employers and educational institutions the second theme has to do with lifelong learning pathways and microcredentials so learners should receive guidance in building lifelong learning pathways and acquiring microcredentials so that they can achieve their learning goals then the need to for microcredentials has is very real and it has been they are emerging for quite some quite recently especially now in the in the um in the in the covid economy where which is where we have um um where there is a need for very flexible learning because the uh because of the uncertainty in the uh in the job market um and the and the uh um the option for microcredentials offers this flexibility offers uh ways for uh um job seekers for forlude workers to top up uh to update their qualifications and be able to feel specific and new emerging market needs the third major thing that emerged was about career counseling this is again um uh related to the fluidity of the job market especially during these challenging times and the need for job seekers to be provided with a comprehensive overview of the job market and also the latest uh market trends uh just to pause here you you obviously you will have recognized by now that these major themes have not are not necessarily related to blockchain technologies some of them are and can't be tackled by blockchain technologies but also they they are generally this is this has been a very valuable exercise definitely generally for understanding what are the major challenges uh currently faced in the in lifelong learning um so to move on the final theme has to do with uh data ownership and privacy so this is a very um blockchain uh this is some this is an area that the blockchain can um can help uh specifically with having to do this has to do with um uh learners and job seekers being able to own uh their digital identity and their e-portfolio data and being able to control uh who accesses it uh in what ways and for how long right uh so I'll pause here for a moment and I'll let I'll try and listen to some questions uh before we um before we move on to the the next uh to the plenary activity um so the I can see there is uh there's already a couple of questions on the chat so Barbara is asking how does the personalized uh recommendations work is it constantly updating is it also on the blockchain uh so yeah um so this is work uh um this is ongoing work this is we are still um developing this uh this and we we are still experimenting but the the main the idea is that whenever um a learner reaches a milestone whenever they complete a course whenever they are awarded a qualification they can then review their options they can see what uh what other courses are available for them and what um uh and what um uh positions what job positions are suitable for them um and the the the question by uh Karen uh uh if these are our recommendations driven by artificial intelligence so far we haven't really explored that I mean this is probably um something that we want to explore in a follow-up project as we are now more focused on the actual implementation of these technologies of blockchain technologies and decentralization for making these qualifications available and for making recommendations and delivering recommendations on top of them so we are uh we are using semantic technologies where we are matching uh we are trying to do semantic match uh from between the the ontologies that we have for skills and also the ontologies the data that we have about available jobs and also about available courses uh but obviously yeah the artificial intelligence uh algorithms and these technologies are the obvious uh next step uh Barbara is asking uh on which technology relies the smart buds as the smart buds already work as a prototype yes so as I said before this is we we are reusing and extending the open buds specification um so we are so you in a minute you will have the the the opportunity to be awarded um uh smart buds and then you'll have and then you'll be obviously uh you'll be able to uh view it and uh and download it and verify it uh against the the blockchain records um and alle hello alle by the way we are we are colleagues from the OU but we haven't seen each other for quite some time is it easy for any learner or employer to access instantly the learner's accreditation yes so that's the other use case which is um which is uh also investigated which is mostly investigated by the the public sector agencies that participate in quality chain so it's very important that this that these records are available to educational institutions where a learner is applying for for a new course to for a new degree uh or uh they are available to employers either from the public sector or from the private sector uh prospective lawyers where uh where the learner the learner is applying for opposition so uh what we want to do with the uh with this uh with this project with this pilot is make sure that not only we allow these third parties to instantly verify uh this uh quality to to uh get access and verify this qualifications which is very important because we want to uh to streamline this this process um for example we have several weeks we will uh right now for the verification of a degree we want to uh minimize that to the absolute minimum to instant uh verification uh of qualifications um and we also want to tackle the issues that I mentioned before about privacy so we want to make sure that only specific entities have access to this information have access to the uh the e-portfolio of the of the of the learner of the job seeker uh they that they have access to only specific parts of the of this e-portfolio only to the parts that are relevant for a job or a course application and that the that there is a time frame within uh that this this access is allowed that is not perpetually uh and constantly um uh allowed right any any other questions I think you can you may also I'm not sure if you can also uh unmute yourselves and or raise your hands yes yes you can if if anyone has a question and if if you would like to speak rather than use the chat yes you can unmute yourselves and speak okay um there's also uh we you may want to also hold on to if there's any if there's not a pressing question right now uh maybe you want maybe it's best to move on to the actual uh hand zone uh part of this workshop where I give you um access to the to the platform to um um um for in order for you to to to um to see what uh what a smart bud what a blockchain uh based buds looks like and how you can download and verify it um so I'll uh go back to my slides for a minute okay so this is the this is what um will be doing for the next 10 15 minutes so first of all in order to get access to the platform you need to register your name and email uh in this form I'll paste it also on the um I'll paste the url on the chat some of you have already done that um I had since I had put the the link on the oeg connect platform a few days ago and some of you have already uh accounts and then the next step will be to as soon as I create accounts for you on the platform then you'll be able to uh you'll receive emails uh with um invitation with an invitation to complete your registration um the next step will be I will be me awarding you a bud for your participation in this particular uh workshop uh and then uh you'll be able to view download your buds verify it and then as a last step I'll ask you to provide your feedback in a very short survey so let me um let me paste the the link to the uh to the registration form on the chat so that you have easy access to it um and for those of you that have already um uh initiated uh registry some of you have already initiated your registrations uh um and some of you have um uh started um uh your registrations I'll just send the resend an invitation to those that have not completed their registrations um right so I'll give you a minute to fill in this form uh obviously this is um anyone who does not wish to to um um to try this feel free to um um um not um um not complete the form it's not it's not a mandatory exercise but obviously yeah it's um it's quite important for for the for this project to get as many people as possible to try especially from the open education community to try these tools and acquire some early feedback uh again I need to say that these are um uh early prototypes uh we are now in within quality chain we are now moving towards from the requirements elicitation phase to the actual testing and deployment uh phases uh with a more with a wider deployment uh with wider deployment uh coming up in the uh in the next year uh so I can see that already some of you have completed uh the form so I'll what I'm what I'll do now is create the um the accounts for you now 15 15 people that's great right I'll give you a few more minutes I'll give a few more minutes to everyone to uh finish up their registration so your um invitation email should arrive just about now so I can see that everyone almost everyone has registered uh so um let me share my screen again okay um so you uh so this is the um um um homepage of this uh of this tool you will um you may have already seen that uh so what I'll do is uh sign in so these are the these are the badges uh that I have created on the platform which are which I can then award uh to you this is uh this is the the badge for this workshop uh decentralized open education using uh blockchain technology if I click on it I can see some uh details about the badge uh more details are available to uh to uh to someone who has um received the badge so we have if I um move on to uh badges screen I can filter the list um uh with uh participants of this workshop so I can start uh awarding uh badges to the um the people that have already finished their registration um let me do that so as soon as I award uh so the badge assignment oops uh so the uh badge assignment is pending as soon as I award the badges um you will receive an email a notification saying that you have a new badge in your portfolio next there's a question on the chat that says what happens if a participant loses access to the email that would use to create this account right yeah so this is this is a this is an open issue um so we um one of the one of the things we are investigating and one of the things that you can do with blockchain technologies have what we call what we call self sovereign identity identity that belongs to you and doesn't belong uh to a third party to a to a company to google to an email provider uh identity that uh that is um uh that you control and that you own um but so far for just for the purposes of this of this prototype we uh I'm afraid yeah we'll have to rely on good old email and uh and participants everyone having access uh assuming that you that you will retain access to your email account uh at least for the purposes of this of accessing this uh this platform uh but it's a very yeah but this is this is a this is a very important uh issue being having uh complete control over uh your identity and obviously the ways to authenticate yourself against um uh and being able to access your your portfolio because in the at the at the end um the this platform is currently owned by the the open university we are building it but in a future scenario you can imagine that this will belong to you you will be able to store you'll you'll have uh what we call uh pods uh storage pods on your own devices which are then connected to the blockchain they are verified but you own uh you will be able to have um uh control over your your content this is actually uh what um uh where what we are working on with um uh together with um the team from uh team bernersley who is spearheading spearheading this initiative on solid uh on um uh uh self-owned uh content uh uh on the on the web so this is um this is quite a um quite an emerging initiative and something that we want to uh to look at uh in the future um but just for the for the purposes of this um uh of this of this session uh we will uh we will um we will use these these tools in a more traditional sense in a more traditional way through uh authentication through email and um um being able to uh reset your uh your passwords through email like you do in any uh in any web uh in any website i'll make sure that everyone uh let me just before answering i can see there is some activity some more activity on the chat but before i look at that i'll make sure that everyone has their badges uh so that you can have and go so that you can go and have a look at those um so i think everyone is now uh everyone has been uh has a bad a bad spending so start issuing uh its buds so this may take a while um let's see um so there is um there is a new there's some questions about um about cell phone content so uh this is i can paste some um i can paste some links on the chat for with more information about this uh about solid about the solid initiative and how you can actually own your data on the web um let me go past let me go back and so this is taking a while but i'll make sure that everyone has their badges awarded okay so now you should all have received your uh your buds do let me know if you haven't uh you should receive a notification an email notification in a few minutes so uh going back to the questions Ali is asking about integrating certification from the past and from different educational providers who are no who are that are not part of the platform so the idea is that uh educational institutions and everyone are both public in public um both prospect employees agencies organizations from the private and from the public sector should subscribe to such a network this is this is like having access to the internet if you don't have access to the internet you can't really do a lot these days so imagine that this blockchain network is like another like another layer on top of the actual internet so organizations that wish to use the services need to need to subscribe to this need to be a part of this of this network in order to be able to use these services going back to Ali's question about integrating certifications from past and from different educational providers this is another challenge that we want to this is this is this is a very important question this is another challenge that we are looking into how you can in a sense have stackable uh credentials how you can stack up your credentials from different your qualifications that are acquired by different educational institutions and in some cases this can be done easily if the the qualifications part of the eqf for example or of another framework the european qualifications framework of or of another equivalent framework in in other cases if you're talking about informal learning this is this is this is an open challenge of how you can actually make sure that these that informal qualifications are recognized as well so this is something that we want to to look at so by now you should most of you should have all of you should already have received your badges i can show you you can you can view those badges let me sign in i'll do that myself i'll sign in with my learner account with a student account so i can so i can see here in my badges page the the badge that i have been awarded so this is about so this is the decentralizing open education using blockchain technology workshop participant at the open educational global there is a certain json data that are available and certain hashes that point to date on the blockchain i don't want to go into technical detail on what its field is about this is this is your data so you can download this and you can inspect this alone alone so i'll only mention at this point that we have certain tags attached to the to the to the buds these are you can see in this case we have tags mentioned in blockchain decentralization lifelong learning e-portfolio accreditation these are the skills that correspond to the skills that you have acquired from this from this workshop from this session and we are using these to match to do semantic matching to at a later stage to do to to skills that are required in the job market and then to in order to provide recommendations to to learners what you can do what you can also do right now is download either the blockchain verified version of the buds this is the version of the buds that you can verify that verify against the blockchain or the traditionally verified buds this is the traditionally verified buds is the the buds that you can verify using services like buds so what i'll do is i'll download the blockchain verified buds and then if i go to the home page i don't even need to be logged in to do that if i imagine that i am a prospect employer an employer that wants to check the qualification these buds that someone submitted to me i can click on validate the buds i will select the buds and i will also select the recipient's email so if i click on validate then i get the result that the buds is valid and the specific checks that have been made against the blockchain record so i'll give you a few minutes to try these yourselves if you have any questions please put those in the chat and or unmute yourselves and ask them i can see there is already a comment by Sean one of the challenges faced by large blockchain providers such as Ethereum is that the size of the distributed ledger becomes huge and requires its node to download and store all buds for other people this is again this is a this is a this is a concern yes so this is a very valid concern not budges but contracts on Ethereum the so as some of you may know if you are familiar with blockchain technologies yeah they're based smart contracts what we call smart contracts are quite quite essential they provide the logic behind awarding a budge and the criteria for awarding a budge and for other and obviously for other operations on the blockchain so the scalability the scalability of the blockchain what's shown is mentioning is a very valid concern there are there are a few technical solutions with which i will not go into much detail but there is the latest ethereum we are using in particular we are using ethereum within within quality chain there are the latest versions of ethereum do have some are considering very seriously scalability and they have some measures to to facilitate scalability and i'm also i will also paste a link on the chat to answer a previous question about about about self-owned about self about owning self-owned content on the web i'll paste that i'll paste this paste this link on the chat for anyone that wishes to find out more about the solid initiative which is not which is related to decentralization which is powered by decentralization about from it uses blockchain technologies in order to to enable to enable web users to actually own their to actually own their data um so ale is ale is asking about customizing budgies so this is yeah so we haven't yeah we haven't thought about that so we could be yeah this is a good suggestion thanks ale uh there we we uh there's there there there's no way currently to to do that but um yeah uh we'll uh yeah we'll have a look and see what we can do in order to yeah to be to allow participants to allow um to allow people to actually customize their their budgies right so i'll give a few more minutes to anyone to um to try out to download their buds and verify it uh shon is asking if there is if uh if solid uses um a fully distributed ledger or a multilateral ledger such as corda so i'm afraid i'm not the best person to answer these questions because i haven't i'm not a solid expert but there are certain people in my in my team that are looking into that i'll paste the link here for our for our blockchain open blockchain initiative where you can find more details and you can also get in touch with the other people the rest of the team members that are actually actively looking into implementing solid um if there is another so barbara barbara is asking if there is another place to test and verify the buds so the the blockchain version of the buds can only be verified on our platform because this is um uh this is the currently the only endpoint um uh user interface uh endpoint for verifying um blockchain buds the uh the non-blockchain version of it can be verified again against uh services like uh like buds are so these are the um these are currently the the two options that you have either um to verify like something like verify a buds smart buds against the the blockchain or against another service like uh like buds sorry i'm gonna paste the link so we are nearing the end of the session as i mentioned earlier i don't want to keep you here for more than an hour there is a lot a lot uh a lot of interesting things going at the conference so i don't want to hold you here obviously you'll continue to have access to the platform even after the the end of the session and uh as a last remark i'd like you to i'd like you to have a look at this um uh this short survey i'm pasting the link uh in the chat i'll also send um later on a reminder an email remain reminder about this this is as i said earlier this is ongoing work we still have a long way to go within quality chain to actually test and deploy these solutions uh at a large scale uh so you are you can consider yourselves as our very early testers as our early uh uh guinea pigs so your feedback is very very important uh for the for this initiative so um i'll thank you again for your participation and thank thank you for your questions for your very active participation in this uh in this session and um i'll uh wish you a very good conference enjoy the rest of the conference and hopefully yeah we'll uh we'll meet again in uh either in in the oe g connect platform or yeah in another virtual or even face-to-face uh conference at some point in the future thanks