 Thank you very very much. Let me start my timer because that's quite important if I really want to To be able to keep everything on track So I'm Diana. Donna. He's my colleague. I'm the ray. We are coming from Romania from Timishara Our university is brick and mortar. We are a very traditional University established in fact since Romania was born as a country and And we have how to say a lot of professors which who still believes That the education should be traditional that the higher education and the professors are in the ivory tower and Everybody's alone only it's for a tiny gate in the last almost 25 years The e-learning center, which I'm leading has tried to change that fact and has tried to show a different perspective to how education and higher education can be done and Back in 2010 so about 12 years ago We came up with this UPT, which is our university digital education strategy Which luckily enough was approved by the Senate because this is how things works in universities And we were able to to work with it and apply We first started with digitization and I'll say something very briefly about that Why I'm putting this just to create the context on how important the individuals which are doing things are Exactly what Andrea was mentioning this morning. So we started with digitization obviously we wanted to build up a virtual campus and Obviously that was based in Moodle and then the uni campus and a lot of training and support And I think that's the thing which we do quite well Probably training and support because a lot of other universities around Romania have come to us to give them the training and the support And also the information and the knowledge transfer to them the virtual campus is based on Moodle Our current version is 31110. We have a lot of plugins Which also makes the life a bit more difficult for Andre. He's our headmaster on virtual campus when we are Trying to make updates and so on This is why we are still not on Moodle 4 because it was too little time to be able to do all of those updates And especially that we rely a lot on the mobile app, which is quite important for us These are just some numbers. We do statistics. We are engineers. We love numbers so that's why we keep showing them all the time and I just want to point out that more than a hundred thousand of Resources and activities have been created in the virtual campus only in one year, but our professors Then we moved back in 2014. I think to a second stage which is still continuing So we this is all under development constantly and continuously, but this is part of a strategy and a vision Which is called digitalization on that where we were focusing on the Enables of the digital education and not only on the early adopters and here We really wanted to create Co-creation one of the strengths of our university and one thing which I strongly advocate for everybody is Involving students in co-creating either open educational resources or any other resources Anything which you can do and then reuse either in education or for the larger community of the region And we focus quite a lot on virtual mobility is since then Just in the moment when the pandemic started we looked at digital transformation and this We wanted to do it because we really wanted to have this academic culture change Which is very important at least in higher education I'm pretty sure all of you are aware of that if you don't They do that shift from instructional design to pedagogy, but also to policies and to administrative things All the technological Inputs which you will put and it doesn't matter how much support and training you will give it will not happen So we focus for about eight nine years on that and we were able to say back in 2020 Okay, we can see quite a lot of changes which was lucky because the pandemic started and We were able to run and to smoothly in one day in fact to move from Traditional education in campus to fully online education because all of our students were already in the virtual campus The professors had the material there only the synchronous meetings were needed to be planned properly What I would like to focus a tiny bit more is about micro-credentials and how you build up that community collaboration, which is very important for digital transformation back in 2014 we initiated Only campus which is a MOOC platform dedicated to Romania, which is run now by us But provides courses from six other universities and a lot of courses which were developed in international partnership But you cannot do that academic culture change without partnership and without this community of collaborators And we were very happy to to have Moodle among those along with a lot of other very powerful international and European Associations so why micro-credentials why back in 2014 we focus a lot on open badges and micro-credentials And the reason is quite well known. These are the data coming from United States Pre-pandemic 2019 done by Holon IQ I just want to push it to you because I know quite a lot of you come also from companies The numbers are staggering and they need to take be taken into consideration and as you see here Quite a lot of that is not done by the higher education The higher education was missing a tiny bit on that start and here is a structure which Holon IQ proposes for how to build up the micro-credentials and just the last three Those where the higher education has a strong input in the last years and obviously with the MOOCs and everything Which was happening worldwide Something what we have done from the vision and also why their policies and the structure like Andrea mentioned today are so important At least in Europe and some evidence and effects of that Back I think in 2015 European Union has put up together a task force a group of people which we and Had this idea of Erasmus projects and so on on open badges So they said okay, let's test it. Let's do it and then let's do some research based on that and let's work it further that came became reality in December 2020 when Micro-credentials and European approach to micro-credentials became a hot topic for the European section of the Commission and then just later one year They had the launch event of the digital credentials and of everything once The research and the policies and the experts have been doing and putting together Then June 2022 came when a European Union Council has approved a recommendation For those who are not so much in European Union things This is very important because a recommendation of the EU Council Which is the head of the prime ministers and the presidents of the country becomes almost as a law in Europe So every country will need to adopt it and I need to say I think 26 countries have really adopted it in only three months and applied in their country Why this is important because without that Usually you cannot really do something at least not in the public education sector because you don't have the law and the Framework for the obviously the companies can do it, but not the public sector. So that's why Policies developed by the European Union which are based usually in the research and the task force which lead that the individuals Which started are very important in Europe I will try to drag attention to the changes here And I got quite a lot of questions just last week when not at a strategy for my new education in Austria I presented a similar topic. They said what's the difference between micro credentials and short training programs, which we had probably since apprenticeship in New age and so on new age and so on. So in the Illuminis is the last two bits the portability and the stackability The ability to create your competencies and to build that Modulary which again is becoming quite important and quite hot in Europe and in education These are the standard elements and we will come to that to the end with the relation with Moodle and asking all of you to Think about that at the end. So I will bring that back to the end I need to say that the European Union has put in this recommendation the interoperability Which is a key factor on anything which now happens in micro credentials and quite soon You will see also in certified diplomas and in diplomas worldwide. So that's based on the worldwide web foundation Data, which is the Elmo and it's the ADCI. It's quite verifiable data So that gives the door open technically to be able to do whatever you want with that after that Something about how we see those we see them only informally in big at the beginning So this is what we started doing. We start doing this with workshops. We run very popular workshops Andrea was at one of I think some six years ago something like that So we run it for 10 years now one in March, which is dedicated to open education one in November December which is dedicated dedicated to digital competencies and skills and recently one in June Just because we had so much requests Dedicated to digital transformation where we look at the society in general also the region culture and a lot of other things Where digital plays a role? So we started with those and this introduce open badges in Romania And they became very very popular a lot of people in education sector wanted to have them Then in the pandemic we had these together online webinars, which were very successful Our average attendance rate was about seven eight hundred Educators every day every week. Sorry. So every week we were meeting them online and doing this This was beside the training and the seminars which we were giving so more than 10,000 open badges became a fact Which allowed educators or especially from Pre-university education to climb the ladder Professionally basing on the knowledge which they had they become recognized even before the EU gave us somehow the permission This is how they looked this year. We had to the shaping together webinars another almost 5,000 badges which were released We use them for a lot of other activities as you see and the one which became very sought after is the Contributor one which we built up in the pandemic to encourage professors from high schools and gymnasium Which were really contributor with open educational resources and putting it out and helping the others And it became one of the most sought-after At least in the Romanian education system very shortly about short courses So we build these short courses based obviously in the experience Which the MOOCs with the micro specializations and micro masters have showed to us which are modular and the validation We done is industry and association. We haven't been looking at other quality assurance agencies We just done the validations associations and here Moodle and a lot of other so she's played a role an example is the open virtual mobility the badges which were dedicated to virtual mobility and the other example is about the badges dedicated to Enhancing digital competencies for the creative sector and Andre will say something about the technical development not to bore you with stuff like that So I will switch the focus a bit to the implementation stage of these types of micro credentials The first one is the our first foray into micro credentials was the open virtual mobility project which began in 2017 Moodle was at the beginning of implemented badges in their core code so we chose to Use a provider for badges from one of our partners from Italy So in order to implement or integrate the badge emission Emission mechanism we developed an API which sent well actually we used an existing API X API plug-in to send learning record stores by which the best Mechanism issue the badges and they were brought back into the Moodle based open virtual mobility learning hub There were three tires of badges Which corresponding to the completion of a course? the general Schematic you can find in the in the image to the right This is an example of Showing the badge which a user has already acquired or which they can acquire if they finalize completed the all of the courses mandatory activities This is an example of the badges. We had seven different skills which were Then tick tiered by three levels Basic level intermediate and advanced level and each was corresponding to the completion of a course in the Moodle based Open VM learning hub Then we switched to another project, which was digital culture here We had 13 different courses in seven languages corresponding to the languages of the partners each of these courses had the road corresponding a badge But this this was already 2019 and we switched to the internal Moodle mechanism to award badges The badges were defined by the skills they represent and Each of the users that acquire them could then use them outside of the platform But the unicampus platform which actually hosts the digital culture courses is the issuer of these badges Which were first defined here But then they were integrated with Badger, which is the newest Backpack integrated with Moodle following Mozilla badges is Fall from grace so to speak This is an example of one of the badges that was developed was Defined and then of course awarded to all of the users who who completed the courses As I said, we prepared a lot of tutorials in order to allow the course Participants or the graduates to use these badges in their social media profiles, which of course didn't Develop any new mechanisms or anything like that, but these Tutorials these Guidelines were very important because the target group for this project were people with low digital skills mainly from the digital side of the Sorry for the from the cultural side of of society However aside from the badges which as I said are already core of Moodle We also implemented certificates because we had a lot of requests from people who wanted to use More traditional approach to recognition Badges are mainly aimed at showing them in the social media page profile or of every user however, certificates can be saved as PDFs even printed if Diana mentioned earlier somebody needs to prove that they Acquired some some skills or some badge. So we implemented them Certificate mechanism, which is by default available in Moodle workplace, but it is available in Moodle LMS as an installable add-on So we developed all of these certificates of completion as I said they needed to Be in all of the partner languages you have there an example of a diploma in German This is an example how the interface for creating a badge is shown in in the Moodle for those of you who haven't Experienced this and also the large number of criteria that needs to be met by somebody who wants to to receive this certificate I will mention very briefly here the virtual campus of the Polytechnic University of Timishara, which is our main e-learning platform This is a closed platform So as Diana also previously mentioned, it's a very rigid Structure because it's the official learning process by the ministry which is Accredited so micro credentials, unfortunately do not carry that much weight. However, because of the Badger integration We also prepared Tutorials allowing our students and professors to display in their profiles in the virtual campus the badges that they received Elsewhere we also had a limited program to award The professors which were more active in the community But these as I said are not officially recognized. They are only Just Therefore show so to speak The badges that Diana mentioned for the webinars we Presented during the pandemic were not actually issued using Moodle However, we used Badger directly because a lot of the participants to these webinars were not Users on the virtual campus platform actually one of the most Representative demographic were pre-university teachers because as Diana said there is a requirement for self-improvement in the academic or pedagogical areas so each of the Professors need to prove that they did something to improve their capability their skills The micro micro credentials which are also mentioned in today's Keynote speech are very important one of the project where we are participating is the EBSI Infrastructure the European blockchain services infrastructure which aims to implement blockchain as a kind of medium in order to facilitate this recognition across borders in Europe using blockchain as an immutable way to Store and present and use all of these recognition criteria At the beginning of the this year summer we finished the piloting phase of this project where three partners from three different countries were Created and implemented the scenario where a fictitious student which Graduated from one university from one country was able to gain a diploma Which was recognized through blockchain in another country where they finished a master study and then they went to a third country to Begin their PhD studies all of these credentials were stored using blockchain and were very easy to Use to validate and to be recognized This project is currently ongoing. It's sweet. It started switching from Testing to towards production or maybe pre-production. So maybe this is something which you could Maybe follow. Why do we mention this? because integrating this mechanism this blockchain use through EBSI or another similar Infrastructure it's something that could be Maybe desirable to use in Moodle There is not Through our knowledge such a mechanism yet Available. However, we have colleagues. I have a colleague who during his PhD studies focused on blockchain technology and hopefully we will be able to continue work and integrate a mechanism to maybe integrate all of the badges or certificates that Moodle issues Using such a such a blockchain connection with all of the advantages that this incurs This is a more detailed view of the partners and the transnational aspect of this of this project Yeah, so I went a little bit further with my speech so I will let Diana finish Yes, so why this EBSI is so important because it proves it really proves among 40 big large and traditional universities in Europe that there a diploma an engineer a doctor a Diploma can be transferable recognized by other universities at this moment Not by the companies But it hopefully that will be implemented because of the council approval approval of that and the Legislation which is changing in the countries to be able to prove that they have done this degree with the Competencies with the courses with the marks with everything and that's be below us to the student It's in his wallet so he can carry it out everywhere. It's becoming very personal It's not based on a system which sometimes fails or it has difficulties to prove if a diploma exists or not So that's why we wanted to do it and moodle should play a role on this not yet But hopefully we'll be able and I also mentioned European universities Why we are focusing so much on micro credentials our university is part of Udres Udres is one of the 28 European universities Alliances which have become very powerful for the higher education building up the multi-university campus and All of these partners now we are implementing and validating micro credentials and also blockchain diplomas between us So that's why those are important and why we test it with piloting and From this year. We really start doing it at the larger scale something to think about as I mentioned Those were interlaced the European digital credentials for learning as they are put in the European Council Union Let's make it like that stack. So all of those need to be met by any tool The anything which is developed and which looks at the micro credentials and in the in the right Yes, that's right also for you. We put what the moodle certificate and badge is doing and where is missing So you can see that quite a lot of those are Fixable and done for example one of the things which we will like for moodle to be able to do is to have full Main and email address separately and the email address hidden only to be shown in the wallet of the participant That's something in which we are working and obviously the wordie body date of issuing all of those are existing the other bit which is not very clear and the European Union Council asked to be quite clear is the workload you can Only put it as a text Not as a number those numbers will become important for the stack ability of the micro credentials So they will need to be separate as a field quite soon And then the others the level and the cycle of education again only as text You cannot select it or you cannot input it as something the type of assessment is missing completely You can put it again only in the text the form of participation online and blended That's what you put but also again as a text is not a clear field Separate in the moodle certificate and then obviously the type of the quality assurance, which is very important Nowadays that's imported for the awarding body like a university and their associations which are Supporting that so my time is up and finishing it's the last side. This is why this is good, you know And that's really something which we need to do so as told you is the last slide So this is us and the team behind us, which is working quite strongly on that. Thank you very much So questions I'll ask that directly Thank you very much my name is Jim judges from Warwick University in England Thank you for a really detailed insight into your work very exciting Can you say something about this common problem with the ivory tower and the small door and what impact has your work had on the size of that door? I strongly believe personally, but also in part of our group on on the early adopters and on the improvement Testing, you know, so proof of concept bring it to pilot and then bring it to large scale It's grass road movement, which will always work. It's my experience. I've been doing this since 95 more or less So I can I can this is it how it happens You need a bit of luck also I will say that and the luck usually comes if you are in a community This is in my experience at least how it comes So you built up either associations or you join existing association. You change the structure of some association Like for example, IEEE. I don't know how many of you know about IEEE. This is huge. This is American base They are very much focused on money on engineering. We managed to change in the IEEE education the idea of IEEE how they work the Micro-certificates and for example with this topic and that they looked more on open access and open education and Micro-certificates, which were about 10 years ago. There was so strongly of Gansley's and now it's changed It's become part of their core policy and when an association or community does this Every individual which is part of that community of that association will do something will hear something and then the change is happening So that's happening at least in our experience How we change that at university level beside of the strategy policies and so on support and training You'll never fail if you do that properly, obviously Hi, could you talk a little bit more about how you've ensured equivalencies across badges and how you determine what levels each badge equates to The definition of the badges was individually Set for each of the courses. So the course creators the learning design instructors who created all of the activities and resources which were available made sure that The assessment methods and the skills that they were Proving by issuing these badges were What the same so it's not more a technical issue, but a policy issue Does this answer your question? Good morning. Hi. My name is Matta Buenagini. I'm from University of South Africa We also starting to work on a blockchain for our credentials What can you share as the biggest lesson that you can share for us as we get started on this journey? Actually Yeah, so I was just trying to put him to say so everything which is developed in FCI So the in the European blockchain system infrastructure is becoming open access one of the main requirements of everything Which is funded by European Union is open access So that the code and almost everything it's there is available as I said, it was piloted already this summer And it worked so we'll see but several wallets have been developed and so on so you can look at that Have a look at the FCI website. I think we have it somewhere here Where it is yep This is one for example and then this is the other one So if you look at those if you just say FCI blockchain Europe, you will find it It's it's one website which is showing this now So that's in the first page don't go to other pages, which are the successful source pilots If I can complete the answer so our biggest take from our initial foray into blockchain is that it's not a Technical problem. So because there are a lot of Tutorials and technical people who know how to implement how to create a node and connected and the issue all of these blockchain The biggest issue is to make these scenarios to use them and especially convince the authorities or the people who are in position to accept them to Recognize that the diplomas which are stored there are valid and they do Represent reflect some skills or abilities for the for the weather