 Good morning or good evening wherever you are. My name is Ebos Janilsson. I am in the Eden EC Executive Committee and I will moderate this session for today. I'm a professor in innovation and open online learning and I'm based in Sweden. Today we have a very interesting topic for the webinar about MOOCs and micro-credentials, which we will hear more about by our distinguished presenters. But before we go into that topic, I would like to briefly present something about Eden. This year we have the fifth European online and distance learning week organized by Eden. And if you would like to tweet, it is hashtag EOBLW2020. I will write it in the chat in a minute. So warm welcome to you. We had the possibilities for a chat where you can present yourself and also right where you are coming from. And we also have the Q&A. This session will be about 45 minutes. So warm welcome to all of you. Let's get started. So Eden is the largest active and developing professional community of research and practitioners of open distance and e-learning in Europe. We have been registered in the UK since 1997. And the Eden was established in 1991. The mission is to network and collaborate, facilitate knowledge and practice exchange, improve understanding amongst professionals in distance and e-learning, promote policy and practice across the globe, and support the universe to modernize education in Europe. We have members, both institutions, individuals and networks. And we also have the Eden Network of Academic and Professionals, where everyone can meet and find collaborators and project partners. So why become a member in Eden? It is a professional community where you can share your interest and your research and work together with others in the same area, attend conferences, establish partnerships, and get free access to our electronic publications and get our newsletters. We are in partnership with both traditional open universities and colleges with nationalized associations and bodies and researchers of open, flexible distance and e-learning and also at the school level. We have the open classroom initiative. Actually, that will start this afternoon and also continue next week. We also partnership with vocational training and the corporate sector. And of course with EADTU, who is here to present to you today. This webinar is organized within the Eden Special Interest Group on Technology-Enabled Learning and Quality Enhancement, and I'm the share of that working group. So if you would like to have some more information about Eden, please go to our webpage. So with that, I would like to present George Ubax from EADTU. He is the Managing Director of EADTU, the European Associations of Distance Teaching Universities. EADTU is the Europe's institutional association of leading universities in online, open and flexible higher education and is at the heart of the modernization agenda of European universities. Grown from its 11 founding members in 10 European nations, EADTU now has a membership of 15 institutions and 14 national associations across 25 nations. Its membership covers over 200 universities and around 3 million students. George Ubax is responsible for the development of the EADTU network, policies and execution of its goals in online, open and flexible higher education. He is coordinator of International Academic Cooperation Networks and our networked curricula, virtual mobility, business model for lifelong learning and also is the coordinator for the European Council Consortium representing the common micro-credential framework and also the E-Excellence Movement on Quality Assurance. He is also leading the ICD-UNESCO Focal Points of Quality. And as a coordinator, he networked in several of the national and international organizations like EUA, ENCA, ESO, ICD and UNESCO. So we're welcome to you, George. I will also present Katerin Mongenet, who is a professor in computer science from 2009 to 2012. She has been vice president of the University of Strasbourg in charge of the digital strategy. In May 2013, she was appointed policy officer at the French Ministry of Higher Education in charge of the project the France University Numérique. The aim of this natural project is to support the French universities to develop online education and promote innovative teaching and learning methods using digital and online tools. She was responsible as a development of one major project in this agenda, the FUN MOOC platform, launched in October 2013 and dedicated to French and Francophone universities and their international academic partners. Since September 2015, she is the sale of the public organization that has been created to carry on the FUN platform. The objectives of this organization are to manage the platform and its evolutions, to develop new partnerships and activities, and especially in the context of lifelong learning education and to increase its francophone and international visibility. So a warm welcome to you as well and the topic is about European MOOCs for the labour market, micro-credentials for continuing education. So by that, I will warmly welcome you both and I will warmly welcome all of our participants and give the floor to you, George. Thank you so much, Eber. Thanks so much for this late possibility that we had to join in and step in with this interesting topic on micro-credentials, on which we are going to focus this afternoon. On behalf of the European MOOC consortium, I'm going to share this slide now. Here you have an overview of the partners in our European MOOC consortium. It's a consortium for the Future Learn from France, OpenUpEd, EduOpen and MiriAra X. We represent the major MOOC platforms within Europe as they were operating well individually and mostly linked to the specific countries. We took the initiative some two years ago to connect them in European MOOC consortium and we have better exposure. We can exchange expertise because we want to keep track of the latest developments in online education together and also have kind of a European voice on the MOOC sector that we represent and in that sense also being able to address the European labour market better in collaboration. In total we represent more than 3000 MOOCs, 400 high education institutions that are linked or having courses, MOOC provisions on our platforms and 5 languages. Going to the next slide. I'm sorry about that. I need to get... I have pictures in front of the text. European MOOC consortium strengthening the credibility of MOOCs and bringing them actually into the educational system. They have been very long considered as experimental and outside the system but more and more MOOCs are being adopted by universities as elements of their offerings and we want to make that more structured thanks to the labour market. What we have as one of our main objectives of the European MOOC consortium is to make MOOCs a widely considered option so that students but also employment agencies and companies are thinking about MOOCs to fill in the gap they have and the needs for further education. In that sense European MOOC consortium is strengthening the continuing education sector and we have as the consortium to further generate more impact we have submitted a project to the European Commission by consortium but also in addition with some partners of the employment sector and universities and companies. What we want to do for European MOOC consortium for the labour market that is the name of the project is to create a framework defining the role of universities, employment services, companies in organizing MOOCs and digital continuous education and training. So it is about setting up a structure, a new dialogue on making MOOCs available for the labour market sector and fill in the gap which is now missing in offerings of online education that is needed to have more flexible and scalable education. So we are talking really about co-development, co-delivering but also identifying what needs of education are there per sector. Here you see the overview of partners and like I said it's a mix of MOOC platforms but also employment agencies VDRB and Belgium, AMPAL but also the European Network for Public Employment Agencies and PES is also involved in this project as an social partner, they could not be a full partner because of their position but they are very much involved and some universities. The main objectives of the project is to provide MOOCs for the labour market and enhance the quality and strength of the European workforce by doing so share expertise between the platforms on how to make programs or maybe even work together on bringing MOOCs together in a program in an international offering if that is needed for a certain sector innovate education further improve the quality of the education together and then in the end overall we are supporting the modernisation and skills agenda of the European Commission by doing so. What we are trying to do in that sense is to have a response to the growing demand for shorter programs because that is the backbone of this initiative is that we see that there is a shortage of education of FIT programs to support the lengthened careers, the digitalisation of the economy which asks for further containing education as you cannot as an employee work with your initial master only for the coming 30, 40 years that the career is lasting so the lengthening of the careers demand and the change of the economy is demanding for further education by shorter programs. Next it is also a response to the lack of clarity on qualifications so at this moment there are a lot of continuing education sector certificates and badges but nobody really knows what the value of these is and so we want to structure and make much more visible on the value of the education to give you an overview of the complexity at this moment to understand what is offered in micro credentials shorter programs and certificates of badges you have here a full overview of certificates and nano degrees and micro masters and so on but it is a complete jungle of hours or months spent or not clear for what the final qualification is for so now we come to the micro credentials because that is one of the tasks of the European MOOC consortium is to respond to the question how to harmonize the current wide variation of certificates offered in higher education which leads to confusion or matter related to recognition of these credentials only within institutions but also not only within the institute but also outside academia so that was our challenge that we took up together which would have been difficult by one platform already our ambition here is to lay the foundation for a new qualification to address the needs of employers and learners looking for smaller units not only offering but also having them recognized as a valued qualification and making them also stackable because stackable adds to the value as well of the programs because you can build to a further diploma or degree important for every course is that they are relevant recognized and of good quality and all these three elements readdress these three elements make the the value of a program so together within the European MOOC consortium we have come to this common micro credential framework which consists of programs that cover 100 to 150 hours workload depending on the country system of the six ECTS importance also that we indicate the European qualification framework level because then you know what the value is in relation to the bachelor master structure and how many ECTS are connected to that so provided transcript diploma supplement with specifications of the learning outcomes the hours, the level and ECTS earned and operate and prove the operation and reliable method of ID and verification all this guarantees the value, the level and the quality of a program that is certified by CMF so the framework will allow that the learners find recognition which is very important for them for even small steps in continuing education not only for a full bachelor or master learners are triggered to start learning past towards the next milestone because it's also stackable it's an incentive to take smaller programs step by step to a bigger program generate a maximum flexibility by offering online courses as MOOCs are and qualifications are standardized and therefore endorsed by academia and employers and there it's very helpful that EMC is representing 400 higher education institutions because then we have the substance to make a difference and have an impact because when all our higher education institutions that we represent adopt the CMF framework we immediately have a European wide coverage of acceptance of the micro-credential framework how does that fit into the European developments at this moment on micro-credentials because we are not operating in isolation here the European Commission has taken big steps in this this year first of all as a reference there was a European skills agenda of the first of July this year in which as one of the 12 flagship actions the uptake of micro-credentials was one of them as one of the priorities then there was a European education area communication published on the 30th of September so very recent which has further support for large learning and a new EU framework for micro-credentials was set up for more flexible modular learning opportunities so full support for micro-credentials in the European policies at this moment what is the reference the European Commission is referring to we need to re-skill and up-skill through more flexible alternatives than a full degree we can fully agree on that as I have explained further there is a need for a European approach to micro-credentials providing more flexible modular learning opportunities not only for professionals but certainly also for the bachelor master and doctoral levels and then here in their planning it is that we want to come to a common definition and a common approach on validation and recognition because that is lacking and EDTU representing the European consortium we are also part of the commissioners consultation group of experts that are now developing these micro-credentials at the European level to which this is referred to in the end the goal of the commission is that there should be a full system operational by 2025 other initiatives at European level is a project called Markable this is an initiative by the Bologna follower group members in this initiative they have come to a definition of micro-credential being a certified short learning experience offered by a high education institution or other providers designed to provide a learner with specific knowledge, skills and competencies that respond to societal, personal, cultural and employable operability needs also here MicroBall is very much linking just like we already did within CMF the value of the program linked to the Bologna tools meaning the European Co-ification framework as well as the ECTS guide the guidelines the goal here is to in the end have an explicit reference to define learning outcomes of these micro-credentials here you can, I just put this slide so that you can find when you have this slide you can find more information on this then the question comes if we look at the continuing education field of what is offered at this moment because the bachelor master structure is well defined, it's well organized that's great also for PhDs and doctorates but the continuing education market which is growing because of the changing economy and the longer careers the system is not covering the qualification that it deserves what it has at this moment is that we have learning units micro-learning, micro-units these are less than one ICTS we have courses with credits single courses and then what we want to integrate here is this CMF micro-credential program this is not existing at this moment that is instead of getting certificates and badges for these smaller units, the micro-units we would say that if you have a substantial program like CMF is of 100 and 150 hours you would get a qualification called CMF qualification that could be called Gradail which is already a name in Southern Europe for our CMF micro-credentials and next to that we have short learning programs which can be up to 40 ICTS not necessarily moon based but can be moon based, this can be built up from CMF micro-credentials so if you follow a short learning program of 40 ICTS that means that you could build this up from several CMFs sorry about that so here we are working with CMFs for the shorter programs looking at the positioning of micro-credentials within FutureLearn for example here you say they offer on this moon platform FutureLearn introductory courses, they have course series then they put in the micro-credentials which are already existing there and then the degree, so this is the new positioning of this new phenomenon of a micro-credential and here you see also that it is not just theory, we are really implementing this already, they are now I know about 15 micro-credential programs certified by CMF so they have a dedicated section for CMF and we are going to work also on our European MOOC consortium platform with a dedicated section for CMF programs where students can find these qualifications and programs that have these qualifications because it is an incentive for them to immediately look for those programs because they have an added value above single courses and that was my introduction there and I would like to give the floor to Catherine to say a bit more about the French situation with this. Thank you George, maybe you go to the next slide George and so just very very briefly as Eva mentioned it in a very nice introduction, we are a public organization and our main objective is not only to run the MOOC platform but also to develop new tools for the university and schools who want to transform pedagogy in terms of the way they teach and students learn using online tools obviously and then since two years we have created a private branch because we also need to develop professional continuous development or continuous professional development the way I sorry maybe I did it the wrong way because of course we know that lots of learners on the MOOC platforms are people who work who have a job and they want our platform to seek for continuous education so we need to develop all these actions about professional development and to do that we have a partner institution that will deal more with the labour market to develop this activity. So a fun MOOC which is our MOOC platform you have the figures here I'm not going to go through this you will have the slides just two points during the COVID crisis early this year March April May we really had a huge increase of our learners and our traffic on the platform and if you look at the map then you can see that fun as an international audience and we are looking very carefully at the 18% of African learners because we know that those learners are very very dedicated when they follow a course on our platform and of course if I would zoom on the map I would go on the francophone part of Africa my grave on one side and the western African countries that are francophone if we go on to the next slide I just wanted to let you know a little bit about our new trends as we said when we started I'm sorry I'm just going to turn this off because you were a beep and I also hear them and it's traveling anyway so when we started we basically were created to start this new platform and start to create the community in France and in our partners to really understand better what's the move, how it works what we do and stuff like that but very soon after that we got really developments on different topics the first one was to add on the platform and solution to take a nine-example on our platform in order to be able to give verified certificates to the learners and these verified certificates for some of our institutions not all of them but some of them go till ICTS university credit so this is really a first step that George mentioned earlier that on fun you can take a course you can have a certificate at the end because you are taking an exam which is supervised the same way which would be supervised if you would be on campus and at the end you get ICTS but then we naturally seen very quickly that we have new developments and that the MOOCs not only serves whoever wants to take MOOCs but that teachers who have created MOOCs are really willing to reuse those courses with their students on campus to go from blended classes, hybrid education so beside the fun MOOC platform we have a fun campus platform and on this fun campus platform we put the MOOCs we take them and we copy them on fun campus for teachers to say ok I want to take this course maybe for another teacher maybe in another university but I want to use this course with my students on campus and right now the on campus is quite a virtual on campus because as you know universities are closed so it's really very important for us to provide those courses and this is really done in a logic of sharing contents and mutualized platform that's one of our first development the second development is really concerned by continuous education because in the same way that we have seen universities saying ok I'm interested in this course in this MOOC but I want to use it in a specific way we of course have been contacted by companies HR people who say this course is very interesting but I want to play this course to train my employees and I want to do it in a private way because I'm not interested in the calendar that you have on the fun MOOC platform and I want to be able to have my own expert to be present on the course and animate the performance in like that so Fun Corporate is really the partner platform from Fun Campus and it's a platform dedicated to continuous education in the logic of developing training in companies in a business to business level and of course Fun Corporate for the universities is really a very important place because that's some sort of a marketplace of the courses that they have created that are very professionally oriented and that companies can buy and we have another activity in Fun I'm just going to say a few words on that we also develop white label platform for some of our partners so white label platform is basically a platform that is exactly like Fun in terms of technology which is dedicated to someone else so we have platforms for partners especially partners in Africa but in terms of continuous professional development which is mainly the topic of the discussion today we have one platform for the training of civil servants you know French is a lot of civil servants, a lot of public organization and although civil servants have to have continuous education obviously and so they will take it on this platform which is run by the national organization in charge of these activities and we have created another one very different but still dedicated to professionalization in the construction field all those people, all those professional who create buildings, renovate buildings and who have to be aware more and more about all the issues of sustainable development in building construction and this platform which is called Batiman Yoram is really dedicated for that so that's really all the activities that we have and of course we are extremely present and extremely dedicated to the European MOOC consortium for all the reasons that George has mentioned and we are very much involved in the European project on MOOC consortium for labor market and we have lunch two weeks ago, maybe George to go on the next slide we have launched our first micro-credential as George mentioned in his presentation we have decided to give a brand name to this micro-credential that we will have on our platform because in English you can say micro-credential it works quite well but in French or in Italian or in Spanish micro-credential has to be translated and it doesn't work very well so basically we work together and we decided that Gradéo is going to be the brand name for our micro-credential and two weeks ago we launched on our platform the first two micro-credential you have the title of those micro-credential here these two ones not all of the micro-credential that we will have on fun are going to be like that but these two one are created by an engineer school computer science which is called Estia in a partnership with Oracle Oracle the big company the big company on big data and databases so those two micro-credential are going to be operated by the engineer school in partnership with Oracle and when the learner will register to one of those micro-credential they will have MOOCs but privatized of our MOOCs created by Estia and they will also take a course on the Oracle platform which is going to provide more the technical aspects of the training and at the end they will basically of course if the students succeed they will get the Gradéo certificate and this certificate will provide them with four ICTS in the first case and six ICTS in the second case because the first one is 100 hours of teaching load student load and the second one is 150 hours of student load so it will provide six ICTS but at the same time they will also get the Oracle certificate for the course that they will have taken and with that that's basically everything that I wanted to tell you of course due to this coronavirus crisis we are much later than we expected a year ago but we are going back on track and these two micro-credential we start early January and other ones will be announced in December and in January as well well thank you very much for your attention thank you so much both to George and Catherine it was really really interesting to give this very broad and one way deep overview of what is going on because it is really really a hot topic I think all over the world about micro-credentials and how to supply the labour market with continuing professional development in shorter courses and more on demand really really interesting I haven't seen any questions so far in the chat neither in the Q&A I started I maybe have some questions for you so although it is in a rather new stage so to say but you also have some experiences already about it so to start off with what is the response from the labour market and from the learners for those initiatives which you have presented for us George do you want to start? I can only reflect on what we have received from our peer learning activity that we organised and the convention that we did on the topic where we had stakeholder representatives from Student Union as well as European Commission and also companies and employment agencies and they all realised that there is a need for this they all realised that there is a kind of complexity of organising and recognising this so really coordinated actions are needed that is why we are also working towards a dialogue between the different stakeholders of the labour market on the other hand and that is why we have chosen the MOOC consortium as a vehicle because it is ideal in a sense that we have immediately 400 higher education institutions as part of this movement and it is also cross-national so if you would organise a market credential by national organisations it would never work you have to do this at a European level and also the European MOOC consortium is looking at this very pragmatically and the need as it supports also the operations, the core business model of our operations there is this immediate incentive to take a lead in this and therefore you see that the European MOOC consortium is actually one of the first to organise this so we have this agenda for one and a half years now as it is quite a new topic within universities but for us it is already on the agenda so that is why we have the framework already in agreement on and what we see when we present it to the stakeholders in the field they really see the need for this for this qualification there is new qualification because it is missing and it is not doing right to the students in container education to only get certificates and badges currently on our plate is the complexity of organising it and rolling it out European wide with mutual recognition of different organisations but like I said with the platforms I believe we have a good vehicle to do so Would you like to add something Catherine? Yeah maybe we for the learners we really have good feedback from the learners we had last year a survey that we share with our colleagues from ABTU and from the European Mucos Ocean and then there was also a survey for the down by the European Mucos Ocean project and we have a lot of learners on our platform who are currently people working so on fun it is roughly 70% and when we have surveys with these learners they really say they need to have those courses they need to have certificate at the end they need to have more tools and more online content for the content professional development when we talk to companies or when we talk to sectors at least in France there is also a strong need for online content education because no one even before the Covid crisis where we couldn't travel anymore a lot of companies didn't want to have continuous education of their employees face to face somewhere take the train take a flight then book a hotel and stuff like that this is not the way people want continuous education to work anymore and I strongly believe that this is a huge opportunity for universities to be better visible in this field and the Muc platform they have shown something to the world that universities can create very good courses and can provide good content and good accompaniment help for the teachers follow up with the teachers and with the tutors and managers and everything so we are at a moment in time where all these doors are getting open and we have to take as universities as university professors we have to take our place otherwise other people will take their place and the market there is place for everyone but universities should not miss their place and it's now in my opinion yes it is very important what you are saying I mean companies nowadays or the labor market they can't any longer send away people to do some CPD or some training or whatever then it is also more or less maybe good for the person who is sent away for some kind of course or some kind of training but it is very difficult to get the company developed by just one people maybe being away for a course you need to have the whole team going together you mentioned briefly that was actually my other question about universities are universities ready for this? yes I guess they have to be ready for this there is a kind of a was also last week in the vision of the university of the future universities must position themselves as knowledge centers as an important player of demand driven provision of knowledge and some universities manage to do so by the way they are position themselves or their operation and some need add-ons like a MOOC platform which help them in developing online programs but also function as the interlocutor between the university and the companies these MOOC platforms connect universities with companies also they still can do it also directly but that is also where MOOC platforms can help universities in filling in this position in the end it's about providing your knowledge to the students without the MOOC platforms but it can be helpful also in innovating education and exactly what you were saying also Catherine if not university take this position on this role someone else will do it because it is needed well we have three questions here in the Q&A I know we are more or less about to finalize so we have to read all the three questions and you can choose if you would like to which one you would like to respond to or if they are coming together so the first one is there is a lot of discussion around the use of online proctoring and the language of civilians is often used by its detractors what are the panel's thoughts on this and are there authentic alternatives assessments to online exams and the other one is like blended mode we have in Nepal Open University I think that is a response to what you have been telling us and the third one is I appreciate your understanding of the demand for short courses do you have any comments on how many weeks a 100 hour course would take working students who struggle with time if you can maybe say something about those reflections George on the last question of course we all know that these micro credentials at least on our platform they are going to be taken by people who work who have a job, who have a family who maybe wants to have some sport weekend so basically what we try to organize is to say the load shouldn't be higher than 5 or 6 hours a week so you divide 100 by 5 or 6 and then you understand the length of the course this is of course the way we are going to do it on the proctoring solution on the fun platform when we started we had on our code certificate that is to say we gave document at the end to the learners who have gone through the MOOC who have got a certain grade but this document doesn't have value at the academic level because you don't know if the person is really the person who takes it you don't know if he or she didn't treat one way or another so an on our code certificate is something that has a value for the learners but that is not a proof of anything so we have been pushed by universities we have been pushed by learners to say I want to be able to show to my employee to show to my future university because I'm a student I want to move forward in another university for master program for instance I have to have a proof and so to have this proof we went from on our code certificate to verified certificate we are a MOOC platform the only way to a verified certificate was to proctole the exam so but I understand that what we did is completely different than what the university can or cannot do because if a learner on fun is not doesn't appreciate the fact that he is going to be supervised doesn't appreciate the fact that he is going is going to show his ID in front of the camera so we can make sure that he is who he presents it then he has a choice not to take it which is completely different from the university if you have to decide to go with proctoring solution so this is easier for us to organize exams with a proctoring solution because there is no obligation to take such an exam for the learner that's the first point now the second point is the language of the surveillance so when we started and I'm not going to give you the name of the companies we work with but when we started we decided to have synchronous proctoring that is to say when the exam starts there is a page that is open on the on the computer of the learner and then he sees a proctor and talk to him and of course if you don't have proctors that are fluent in your language then it's difficult when we had our new call for tender because we have a public organization we have two F2F app we decided to go from synchronous proctoring to asynchronous proctoring especially because this language barrier was a problem for us and also because we had the feeling at that time that the synchronous way to do things wasn't so important and the asynchronous way to do things was as powerful in terms of security of verifying cheating or not cheating so we went to asynchronous proctoring which means that the proctor is not there at the moment everything is recorded and the proctor will look for the exam afterwards by reviewing the video by listening to the audio and stuff like that and since we switch from synchronous to asynchronous there is no language barrier whatsoever and we are very happy and the learners are much more up here because seeing the proctor was extremely stressful so I don't know if I answered the question but that's my answer I think we are almost in time to finalise so by that I will thank you so much Jorgen, Katrine for your knowledge and the insights on the topic of European MOOCs for the labour market, micro-credentials for continued education and I am sure we will hear a lot more about it not just from you but also how it will roll out in Europe and in the world because it's really interesting. So thank you so much for your contribution it was very, very valuable and also to the participants thank you so much for being with us this Friday afternoon and please keep in touch and we will have the it was recorded so we will have the recording at the EDEN webpage and also the slides will be available at the EDEN's slideshare so please stay connected thank you so much all of you and have a nice weekend and stay safe and stay healthy thank you, bye bye thank you very much, bye bye