 Hello everyone, dear colleagues, dear participants, welcome to the European Distance Learning Week, third in a row, hosted by European Distance Learning Network, Eden, and in cooperation with the United States Distance Learning Association, who is holding its National Distance Learning Week in parallel with the Eden event. My name is Sandra Kucina and I'm Eden Vice President for Open Professional Collaboration. If you're looking at location on the map, you can see I'm coming from Zagreb. So for a whole week, we will run sessions, webinars on different topics related to the open and distance education. Distance education has evolved into an accepted way of learning. Today, new technologies have transformed students into mobile learners, enabled those who are non-traditional students to have the opportunity to learn, as well as those of the low socioeconomic status to participate. Workplaces today demand continuous learning and even our children are introduced to technologies before entering the classroom. More valuable opportunities for our progress path are made possible through distance learning today. So during this week, we will open a number of topics related to the open and distance education. We brought together professionals and practitioners for discussion and sharing of experience and know-how. Today, during this week, we'll be hosting webinars at 13 hours Central Eastern Time, except today, as we have colleagues from USA, so it's not a little later. So just let me, at the beginning, present the sessions which we will have during this week. So today, we start with the Introductionary Panel into this week, discussing distance education, remembering the past, reflecting on present and foresighting the future. On Tuesday, we will be discussing non-formal and formal education, recognition and credentializing of learning, and try to answer the question, are we arriving to the new era of education? One that is more focusing on informal learning, non-formal learning and micro-credentials instead of traditional Bachelor and Master degrees. So join Ulf, Daniel Ellers and his presenters on Tuesday. On Wednesday, we will present some case studies of innovative education, tackling digital literacy for high education teachers, evaluation in distance education designing pathways, and student challenges into virtual mobility with Mark Nichols as the moderator. On Thursday, we have very important issues of quality insurance in regard to high education and reflection to the paper on considerations for quality assurance of e-learning provisions by European Association Quality Assurance in Higher Education. And on Friday, we concluded the week with very important topic and panel discussion with Vim Van Pettengen as moderator on topic of even support to PhD students and research. We have just finished the Eden Research Workshop in Barcelona and we are still high with emotions and impressions about it. We have really good PhD symposium there. So our young researchers are drivers for change and it is our duty to help them and support them in achieving their goals and find the mutual agreement and understanding. So Eden is very strong about this point. Beside these main sessions, we have contributions from the other Eden community members. As you can see today, we have already started in the morning with the session on topic of open education what now with Alistair Krimman and Catherine Cronin and Martin Weller. It was really good discussion and recording can be seen on Eden webpages. On Wednesday, we are having a topic of virtual reality with three ladies, Susan Aldrich, Marci Powell and Diana Andone and then with moderation of Steele Weerler. And on Thursday, we have topic of new learning spaces for learning intensive society which is leading Elena Calderola from University of Paria. Both these sessions on Wednesday and Thursday are starting at 1530 Central Eastern Time. So let me go back to our today's session. Let me focus on today's topic. We will discuss with distinguished experts recent developments on open and distance education looking at it from different perspectives. Personal, professional, public, private, establishment, regional, from open and leading education perspective. It is said that technology have been core to the nature and organization of learning and teaching for millennia. What tools are to use today for distance education? What are the trends? When we look at the future, what we can foresee and what are the challenges? Just only few of the questions we will be talking about today. And let me present to you today's panelists. First, Irina Volngvechny, Director of Innovative Studies Institute at the Vitatus Magnus University, Lithuania and Eden President. She has established national network for distance and e-learning in Lithuania and then Lithemia Distance and e-learning association. Morten Paulsen, Acting Secretary General at International Causing for Open and Distance Education and former Eden President. He is also CEO of Nordic Open Online Academy, which has been established in 2012. Morten is also Professor of Online Education. Then Pat Kacela, the President of United States Distance Learning Association. His current focus is on distance digital learning initiatives with K-12 high education and healthcare industry, as well as the training and telepresence in corporate enterprise market. He is also President of ETC Video, a technology consulting firm based in Florida. Dean Hawke, Board Member of USDA. Dean has over 40 years of progressively responsible and visionary leadership roles in high education, communication and e-learning throughout the United States and United Arab Emirates. He is serving as Managing Partner of Edo Alliance Group, a high education consulting firm. And also in 1998 he co-founded the Connected Learning Network and Comprehensive Provider of e-learning services for educational community in USA and Europe. Stefi Videra, Managing Director of Bavarian Virtual University Institution, which was established in 2000, as a network organization of universities and universities applying sciences in Bavaria, with primary goal to improve studying conditions for the growing number of students who require flexibility both in terms of time and place. Today this network has about 31 member universities with over 385,000 students. And last but not least, our dear colleague Claudio Dondi, Senior Expert in Education and Training, Eden Senior Fellow. Claudio was also Vice President of Eden from 2001 to 2006. And he also directed several European observatory projects on impact of ICT on education practices, policies and research. Since 2013 he has been working internationally as an independent education expert based in Brazil. So I think that we have people from all over the world with similar ideas and views, but from different backgrounds. And I think that involving all of them will bring discussion and presentation today even more interesting and actual. So I'll open the panel and give the floor to Irina, to our Eden President, who will have introductionary statement, and after her we'll follow other panelists. So Irina, please, floor is yours. Thank you very much Sandra, and I see the slides are in progress. First of all, I'm really very happy to see that this is the third European distance learning week that actually was started after successful initiative in the States. USVLA organized the National Distance Learning Week and we therefore harmonize the dates that come in parallel to this week. I'm very happy to see here Pat and Dean, the President and the Chair member. So also Dean, thank you very much for joining in the early morning and also enriching the global perspective on the map. So I will be brief with the slides highlighting the developments, mainly of course from Europe because for European distance learning week perspective. And I hope that you with your statements will enrich it further on from the panelists on behalf of different region. So to open up I would highlight the following statements that preconditions have been established and supported by European education policy for open discussion on the mainstreaming of innovations in learning and teaching. Open as a focus fund has been used in Europe since a decade already and it became also a tool for quality assurance in education because open methods and transparency turned out to be very important for European way of enriching the quality. New learning and teaching schemes are in need for new types of assessment, recognition and certification of learning, despite of the fact that we have lots of projects initiatives that have been implemented already. We need learning and teaching schemes that are up to date with the development. And innovations and ODL are met with a classical theory of development of innovations. Therefore it is also the time to reinvestigate whether we need a new approach and more interdisciplinary, more innovative approach towards something that is all recognized and we call it classical. Eden has a mandate in Delta group. It is a working group on ET education and training 2020 on digital education in learning, teaching and assessment. And this is the second group continuing from previous group addressing main concrete issues that they call from education and training 2020 joint report. You see them listed here, so mainly the address digital competencies and all levels of learning, transparency, quality assurance, validation and recognition as a part of openness, I would argue. Promoting the use of ICT and boosting availability and quality of open and digital educational resources. And that I would just stand in the right position, I think in this new mandate and this position is very promising, I should say. Through exchange of good practices, topics and peer learning activities, we already identified that understanding the focus and practices are very diverse in European member states. Therefore, we think we need more of analysis of trends and foresight and dissemination of best practices, but also unsuccessful practices is very important for every member state. So I think by tuning on understanding, establishing a common understanding and then incubating experimenting practices is the focus of this Delta mandate. Even brought the proposals as contribution to digital action plan, which are to meet the following objectives to ensure networking and open professional collaboration of innovators, teachers, trainers, academics and professionals with aim to mainstream digital transformation in education. And we selected two focuses, one by experimentation, piloting and sharing best practices of application of digital technology for teaching and learning and the second developing digital competence and skills of teachers and learners. If you observe these statements, I think you can identify the position of our network is not to suggest a solution, but to work with members, to work with member states in Europe and to identify practices, success, successful and unsuccessful stories in order that we can learn from each other. Of course, we made them more aggressive if I may say so proposal. I'm not going to read through them, but even established already quite successful actions for both propositions, but I will leave this for later record and maybe discussion. Now, after Barcelona research workshop, we identified that even members as organizations and organizations and researchers already have some statements and proposals towards personalized guidance and support for learning, which is one of the topics actually addressed recently also by Delta mandate. So the statements can be summarized in four areas. One, personalization and adaptive teaching results in a productive combination of teacher support students, particularly me and reinforcing students attitudes. So it works as a positive development towards teachers and students. Open education is a second item on the personalized guidance and it is towards production and use of OER and we also have another line which is not in the slide, but it is mentioned like OER pedagogies. So collaborative flexible sharing nature of social network environments as a potential learning context should be embedded and developed in organizations in order to work on innovative and flexible parameters. The thought would be that teaching should integrate long as differences, interests and needs, competencies and digital technology potential and would have to shift towards more participatory pedagogies supporting diversity of communication more than all in community. I must confess this is one of the greatest challenges observed in Europe because organizations, higher education institutions, schools that they are not ready for that in terms of their quite rigid administrative solutions still in place. Formative assessment and feedback, the final statement from this topic says that actually we have to look more at specific approaches and reinforce teacher learning dialogue through different channels in network environments enhancing learning. We have a summary and maybe also elaboration of those statements announced in the President's block and other resources recently disseminated through the channel. So in parallel sessions, keynotes and presentations, we see the developments of open and distance learning in concrete, let's say, research towards personalized guidance and support for learning in the following topics. So you see the topics, you can identify them, I'm sure not very European but more global ones and I'm not going to read through them. So our next and current contribution in October, November session is European Distance Learning Week. As you can see, if we gather the needs from the bottom, from the member states, from sorry, from the members of PDM, I highlighted the following topics here in the slides that you already heard from the presentation by Santa. And this is so deal development. Also in the topic, one of the major interest is to see how topics evolve and develop. Then formal non-formal education, innovative education case study, presentation, quality assurance for learning, and support to PhD students and researchers. So if we look at the topics that we discussed in Open Education Week 2018, we have challenges for quality of OEA, grassroots of open educators at work, and discussions on how to promote academic integrity in online education. So this is a very brief summary because we can't allow a broader one today on how we absorb the development of ODEAL in Europe this year. And my conclusive statements are that ODEAL topics evolve as rapid as ever. ODEAL changed mainstream education in Europe to a much more flexible, accessible, and equitable mode. Openness made great tribute to the quality of teaching and knowledge in Europe. Practices exist, but impact should be better communicated, and we already think on how we can walk on that even better. And research became the priority, but we should be very accurate about the gap, because the gap increases between the high frontier research and mainstream education practices. So this is also something that we already talked with the policy makers and in Delta Group on how to reduce the gap. Thank you very much for your attention that I think is all of my time. Iina, thank you. We will pose the questions after we have on seductionary statements. So I would like to invite Pat now to give the statement from the perspective of USDLA, maybe also to share with us what do you think are the most important topics issues at the moment regarding distance and online education in Europe. In America, from your point of view, so please, Pat, floor is yours. Thank you so much, Sandra. Good morning, everyone. Just waiting for the slides to load here for a second. But in response to Iina, great opening, Iina, that was fantastic. A lot of similarities between both EDIN and the United States Distance Learning Association. A lot of the same challenges. Communication and best practices. I think that the more and more we can get our communities together to share those best practices, the better we're all going to be. And especially as we come together across the globe, not just the United States doing its thing and the other countries doing their things, I think there's tremendous value in everybody coming together. So a little bit of an introduction on the United States Distance Learning Association. Let's see if I can get my slides to go here. There we go. We're on the backside. I've got to come back to the first one. Okay. So, you know, our mantra, what we do when we introduce the United States Distance Learning Association, we really like to promote the benefit of it. It truly is a family. When I attend the different events, especially our national conference each year, that's the one comment I hear from all the attendees over and over again. They really enjoy coming to the conference because they really feel it's a family environment rather than they're just one out of, you know, 10,000 folks at a traditional conference that might get too big. But we focus on both distance and the digital learning aspects. You know, distance learning being in our DNA as USDLA, but also the digital learning piece of it and how it has changed since we were founded back in 1987. You know, we're going back more than 30 years ago. And at that time, technology was just really starting to come into its own for the video conferencing market. And Dean probably remembers, you know, I know we've both been around the industry for a long time. Back then, you know, it was pretty difficult to conduct a real high quality video conference. What we're doing today would have been virtually impossible, obviously, not to mention the computers wouldn't support it. But just the technology cost alone would be astronomical. It wouldn't be available for the masses. So, you know, we fast forward to where we are today and our mission still stands to be as strong as it was back then to really help support the development and the application of distance and digital learning education and training by uniting. Not only when we say learners around the world talking about both those on the receiving side, as well as those on the creation side. It's a whole community of folks and taking a look at our constituencies. You can see it's not just one particular vertical. Most folks would traditionally associate distance learning with a higher education constituency. And we do have a pretty high ratio of members that are in the higher education but also from pre K to K through 12. So you're talking in your your elementary your middles and your high schools as we call them in the United States. Home schooling is certainly coming up and becoming rather strong. A lot of folks are deciding to school their their child children at home. And we have to be prepared to be able to provide those resources for that particular set of set of folks corporate training. Corporate training. Very, very important. And it is using the same principles of digital and distance learning government military telehealth is exploding in the United States. It's another one of those vertical applications that's been around for a long, long time and the technology with being able to not have specialized platforms to conduct telehealth. We're back in the days you know it might be just one big video conferencing system that could cost 50 to $100,000. Now there's so many different technologies that we can do this right on our own computer platforms like we're doing right now. For some reason slide switched back but let's get back here for a second. Here's our members. Our members go across educators and trainers, instructional designers, media experts, as well as on the technical side, we have the administrators who are taking care of putting the systems together. Then there's content producers, policymakers, learners, leaders as far as in the digital and distance learning. A lot of different members. It's one of the values of our association to bring all these folks together through a series of different events. Our leadership. We have a board of directors that actually oversees the. I keep keeps getting jumped up here, but we have a board of directors that keep on top of. I don't know what's happening here, Sandra. I'm fighting my slides. Somebody keeps taking them back. Here we go. Let's see if it just stays there. Hands off. So we are headquartered in Washington DC. We have an executive committee that oversees the association. We have several standing committees that help with various functions that we put on everywhere from events to awards to membership dean heading up our global partners. Very, very important committee. We have an advisory board, which this year we, we have taken on several members, just us DLA members that we've asked, do you want to get more involved with the association and we've brought them into the advisory board. And that has really helped us because we ended up with folks from all different areas and constituencies and expertise that we can then bring into our different committees. Our sponsors obviously help us out event volunteers as well. Taking a look at, let's see where I'm going to get to the next one here. Just a quick view of our leadership. Again, I'm the current president of the association. But how we work this is we have a very seamless transition strategy where we have a past president, current president, future president working hand in hand. So at any point in time, the three of us are working very strongly together to make sure there's a very seamless transition with the association. Janet major will be our new president in 2019. Ten con was our past president last year in 2017 and Reggie Smith is our new executive director. For those of you who have been familiar with us DLA over the years, John Flores was our executive director for many years. And John decided to step aside this year and he is actually running for US Senate in Massachusetts and states. So in the Cape Cod area. So John, he did a great job keeping us together. And now we have Reggie to carry that torch and help execute upon the desires of the board as an association. Quick list of benefits. Member networking is by far one of the biggest benefits for our membership updates. We really try to keep up to date on what's happening in the digital and distance learning world and disseminate that information to our members through newsletters special events. Obviously this week with national distance learning week, our national conference, which will be next May in Nashville, Tennessee. Access to industry leaders, best practice webinars. The whole list here, you know, representation in the national legislative. So there's a good amount of benefits for our members. Just want to shout out and thank our sponsors for national distance learning week this year. Drexel University online corporate learning week and of course Blackboard. We've been a long standing partner of ours for national distance learning week. Thank you without you as our sponsors. It's very difficult to pull off these events. We are doing a special for membership during national distance learning week from today on through Friday. There is a discount code and our memberships are all discounted everything from our individual memberships to our student memberships in our nonprofit or profit. So if anybody is so inclined to join, we have that discount available for this week. I wanted to point out a really important event when we talk about distance learning is if we the international forum for women in e learning. It is a US DLA presented event. We do it only every two years. We typically cap the attendee list at 100 and as of yesterday, I think we're at 90. So we have 10 additional slots the gals that run this event Darcy Harding, Rhonda Blackburn and Janet major all three on the chair. They've done a fantastic job of pulling us off and bringing together our women in e learning and having them share their best practices amongst themselves. I haven't been to one because they tend to not allow the men over there, although I've offered many times, but I understand it is a fantastic event. And then our call for awards for a national conference. We have that open right now. So if you have an award that you would like to submit for best practices within distance learning. There is that link right there at the US DLA website slash awards. You could go there and you're able to see all the different categories that you could submit an award for and then our award committee will be evaluating those upon the new year. And we will be presenting those awards at our 2019 conference, which my little promotion down there. It is will be in Nashville at the Hilton Nashville airport on May 20 through May 22. And with that, I will turn it back over to you, Sandra. And I want to thank everybody for allowing myself and my colleague Dean hope to participate on the European distance learning week. Thank you, Pat. We had a little delays, but we got it all. So now I'll turn to the Dean. Dean, can you share with us your introductionary statement? Can you hear me, Dean? We cannot hear you. Please check if your mic is open. One, two, three. There we go. Thank you. Yes, the where I think all of us are having a bit of a bandwidth issue. A quick introduction. My name is Dean hope and I have been involved in one form or another in distance education since nearly 1980s. I served in what is called in the United States public broadcasting educational television. As a matter of fact, our station was established in 1957 as a classroom teaching tool to teach Spanish in Louisville, Kentucky, in which they had a, by the way, good ratings. They had 90,000 students watching those television shows. So video has always been an important part. And also the history of distance learning comes back besides the sense of using mail to do degrees and things like that. But it also goes as far back as television with the concept of master teacher, particularly when you did not have the number of faculty that was required to be able to teach certain subjects. As time has evolved, we've seen all kinds of different things. And for me, it was first in public broadcasting and where I served in Louisville, Kentucky, in Texas, where we did telecourses across the state of Texas to Alaska, in which we were offering degrees through the University of Alaska in overnight. And that was in the early days of digital satellites. As it has evolved, we've seen this start in elementary and secondary schools. We have seen it now starting to evolve very much into the higher education sector, which is our primary membership group in the United States Distance Learning Association. This path clearly articulated that we have a, the association has a combination of K-12 primary, secondary school systems and teachers. But we also have corporates, but still the largest majority are higher education, teachers, educational technologists, faculty that are teaching every day. And that's where I'd like to focus, because in my current role as a consultant both in the United States and in the Middle East, this is an area of interest to me. In terms of distance education, it all forms in higher education, ranging from blended to purely online. It's now moved from, I wonder if this will work, and the fright factor that I think many faculty members have when this all began. You're now in a septic practice, certainly in the United States, and I suspect with my European colleagues as well. The numbers of people that are taking some form of distance education has grown rapidly over the past 15 years. And in the United States in higher education, we have 20 million students taking courses anywhere from community college systems two years, all the way through PhD. There are now, I believe, something in the range of 6 million students that are taking distance ed courses, at least one completely distance ed course. And almost all schools are using some form of blended learning as a regular part of their classroom teaching. With that still in mind though, it's interesting to note that there is still some resistance to distance ed, and what that really means in the United States. And I think it has to do not with the students, and frankly not as much with the administration, but with faculty at times. And what we see is still in most of the survey work that's been recently coming out, that faculty still believe, and rightfully so at some degree, that face-to-face is still a more effective style of doing teaching as opposed to online. I think that may have to do as much with the age factor of the students, and it may have to do quite frankly with the age factor of the faculty members, who had not been taught that way themselves. This survey that I've been looking at over the weekend, from inside higher education in the Gallup Hall, which was recently released, shows that the acceptance rate insane, you know. Distance ed is working in as an effective teaching tool, and it's effective as face-to-face. It is growing that, matter of fact, these days over 44% of faculty have taught some online course, and once they do, there seems to be a bit of this revelation. There's always been the intrepidation about is this something that's too easy, something that's too tough. I think probably one of the key issues has been training, quite frankly, and being comfortable with training and understanding system and understanding that this is merely a teaching tool more than anything else. I think people have a tendency to forget about that, but once a teacher, once an instructor or a professor does it, and they kind of get through the first semester, kind of like first year freshmen, they become much more comfortable with the idea and more and more become inquisitive and try to find ways to improve how they do their online teaching. When they do, there's a high level of acceptance, and I believe also more effectiveness, quite frankly. Just to give you a sense, as I said, 44% of the instructors in the United States have taught an online course to show you how fast the rapid growth is there. In 2013, just five years ago, it was only 30%. That trend, I think, will continue to grow. I think we will see us cross the 50% line within the next year or two and continue to grow. It is a reality, and I think there is less resistance to it and acceptance and trying to find ways to use it better. Most say that once they've gone through the experience in higher education of teaching, they are saying that their technique seems to improve because they're having to do it a new way, and they learn new ways of communicating in terms of their students. In a sense, maybe it's less lecture and it's more about the interaction between students and faculty. We see more and more of that. They learn how to give you an example. Back in the late 1990s, one of the things we noticed when I was working in distance ed was that faculty members were overwhelmed who were first doing it because of the Q&As that they were getting. All of a sudden, students that I used to call back ventures who'd never asked a question in the classroom started asking questions because they could with somewhat of an anonymous point of view. And when they did, all of a sudden they were somewhat enabled. They felt like they could ask questions without all of a sudden feeling like they were the kid who was asking this stupid question. And in some ways it caught faculty off guard. We're still going through that evolution and one of the things I think faculty learns with this is once they get past that, who are all these people that are asking these questions? They begin finding ways to organize it, to be able to respond to it, and be able to adapt teaching style to those questions. And I think that's some of what we're seeing in terms of the survey. And again, it's kind of a natural evolution as to what is happening. And every time a person teaches a course, they find new ways to do this. The other side that we're seeing in terms of the United States, and I suspect elsewhere, is that one of the last groups, even though they were very much involved in establishing learning management systems, etc. has been that online degrees, particularly at the master's and doctoral level, are now becoming the north. And this is particularly true in the tier ones that we're seeing. We have noticed that the medium and small schools in terms of marketing have been pushing more and more for advanced degrees that they could do online. The MDA example I think is the one that most of us realize, but also in terms of education and nursing, in terms of master's, not the practitioner side, but the theoretician side. Now, for example, I live in the state of Indiana, and I'll use two examples. Indiana University, while they were an innovator in terms of doing learning management platforms with Angel, and they were one of the places with their skunkworks that developed that. They had been reluctant to do their advanced degrees online, purely online, or with minimal use face-to-face. Now we're seeing doctoral programs come out of Indiana University for the first time in the past two years. The other major school here in the state of Indiana is Purdue, and Purdue may be the most interesting and somewhat controversial one of the group. Purdue, which is a widely recognized top 100, top 150 in the world school, who has always been known for engineering, as well as master's programs in business, has moved into a new area, and that has been, I think most of you know Kaplan University, which was a for-profit school fully accredited, but still one of the classic for-profits, which there's always been a certain creative tension between the for-profit industry and the non-profit. Purdue acquired Kaplan in early 2018, which was groundbreaking and somewhat unexpected. The accreditation groups here in the United States, after a very thorough review, have approved the acquisition and that the degree. Purdue then proceeded to rebrand that Kaplan degree that's now called Purdue Global, and a major advertising campaign has begun. The president of Purdue, who is the former governor of Indiana, but has always been involved in education, a gentleman by the name of Mitch Daniels, has justified this and been an advocate based on the thought that we needed to find new ways to provide education. We needed to find it for people within the state of Indiana at a more affordable price, and particularly for non-traditional students, and also that his core belief is that distance that could be done effectively as classroom. And he has gone forward with this, and while there have been a number of people who have said, I don't know about this. I think we are going to see this as the beginning of a trend for some of the larger universities that will look at this, and they've watched the trend-setting group. They're going to watch them to see if this is a seed or fail. But I think we will see here in the very near future others going down this path, possibly through the acquisition mode, which, again, we've all seen in terms of other learning management type of systems. I think this is just a part of a trend within a higher education industry. It doesn't mean there'll be one master's school, but I think we're going to find new ways that things are going to be done. And with that, I'm going to stop here, and then I'll be happy to answer any questions you all have. Thank you, Dean Ingrid. It was really great to hear. You have such a great experience due to hear how it was before and also on the trends. So I'm sure we will get back together and discussing it further. Let's now move on to the next panelist. Martin, are you ready? Can you present? Martin? This is Martin. Can you hear me? Yes? Yes. So please, the floor is yours. That's good. Thank you, Sandra. I have unstable connections, so I will not use the video if that's okay with you. There are colleagues, there are friends. I will be very short today, and I hope that you hear me. I am connecting from the ICDE office in Oslo, and I started working as Secretary General of ICDE this summer. And you probably know the organization and that we are celebrating our 80th anniversary this year. We now have 191 member institutions around the world representing all continents. And it has been a very interesting challenge to learn about this organization and all our members. I see in the chat that at least some of you hear me fine, so I will go on. The last few years I've been working, setting up my own online school called Kampus Nua. And that has been a very interesting challenge being an entrepreneur in my adult years. In addition to that, I'm also teaching master's students in Norway about online education. So that is an interesting variety of activities. And I also, as probably many of you know, was a former president of Eden. Since I only have a few minutes and that connection might not be that good, I decided to focus on just one issue this time. And it is the flexibility of time. And I have always been really fascinated about how we can make distance and online education as flexible as possible with regard to time. And if you go on to the next slide now, Sandra, it is so that when I was teaching my master's students about e-learning the last few years, I have asked them the question, do you prefer linear TV or streaming TV? And somewhere between 80 and 90% say that they prefer streaming TV like, for example, Netflix and that kind of thing, when they can see as much TV they want at the time they want and then they can ask forward and they can pause and they can see all seasons at the same time. So then I ask them, would you prefer linear education or streaming education? And then they start to look at each other, kind of not understanding what I'm asking about because this is a new concept for them. But that is starting many times a very interesting discussion thinking how could education be if they use the metaphor of streaming television? And then I would like to discuss with people what if digital natives prefer streaming TV and streaming education? What will the results be for that regarding the flexibility that I really, really would like to have in distance education? And what about if you could start study whenever it suits you? What if you can take all the time you need to finish the course or the program? What if you could change the sequence of the lessons if you prefer it? And what if you could study on fast forward going much quicker than the university wants you to study? What if you could learn at your own pace, have a vacation whenever you want, and also decide yourself when you want to do the exams? That are some of the issues that comes up when we start to discuss the flexibility of time. And if you could go on to the next slide Sandra. And if you look around, most traditional education is very linear. It is developed for the university, not for the flexibility of the students. And my worry is that traditional distance education institutions were very focused on the flexibility of time. But now when mainstream education starts to offer more and more online distance education in competition with the traditional distance education institutions, then it seems to me that distance education is becoming less flexible than it used to be. And that worries me. And that is an issue that I would like to discuss with you or answer questions about. So I think I will stop there and I hope you could hear me even though the connection might not be that good. So I'll give it over to you Sandra. Thank you Martin. The connection was very good so we could hear you quite clearly. Just a comment when you're talking about streaming TV, for me it's like going to the shopping mall. I prefer that way because I like to choose what I want, what time I want. So TV or shopping is similar. Okay, but thank you. And now I'll ask Stefi to present her introduction in five minutes. Yeah, thank you Sandra. And good afternoon to everyone here. First of all I want to introduce to you just a little bit the FAUHA B, the Verde virtual university, and first of all I have to apologize because the Verde virtual university set up in the year 2000 is not a university, but a network organization of universities and universities of applied sciences in Bavaria. And our main task is to complete the digital offerings of our universities of 31 member universities. You mentioned it Sandra before. So we have more than 400 professors and university teachers involved in course developments. We have at the moment 520 courses in operation in 15 different subject groups. Should I by myself, so do you see when I flip the slides? Yeah, now on the second slide. Okay, and 100 courses currently in development and 975 learning units in development. This is a new field of area because in the last 17 years the Verde virtual university offered only complete online courses in the terms of the semesters. Now we have two new fields of activity, smart FAUHA B with the smaller learning units and the open FAUHA B. And the very important thing about the FAUHA B is all these offerings are for the use across the universities. And so I think the basic idea of digitization and the basic idea of internet is sharing, sharing of content. And so the basic idea of the BVU is sharing as well. And so this fits just digitization and FAUHA B. And yesterday, Sandra, you asked me to say just a few words about governance and finance of the Verde virtual university. And so I just want to tell you something about the organizational structure. I don't have slides, but I just want to mention it. It's a network organization under the control of the very ministry of science and arts. And this is very important because we are a mix of a bottom up idea. The idea of the BVU is an idea of the universities. It's a bottom up idea. And all the universities are involved and they have a commissioner in the members assembly. And the members assembly is the part we discuss and decide all the main issues about the BVU. And the members assembly also elects a program committee and a steering committee. The program committee eight members, they advise all the issues about the program and about the quality management of the BVU, the Verde virtual university for the steering committee and the steering committee. One president and two vice presidents. They have to decide everything about our programs and about our funding. And here in the office in Bamberg, we are 30 persons just to support our universities, administration, technical experts and project managers. And I think the bottom up idea fits very good to something which is a little bit in contrast to it because we have also the aspect of obligation. All the state universities in Bavaria have the obligation to be a member university, but they have always the free choice to accept a course as a part of their degree programs because of the freedom of the research and teaching at the universities. And so I think the recipe for success is exactly the mixture between voluntary and obligation plus funding. So we are funding institution and we fund and support the course developments at the universities. So just around 90% of our budget goes directly back to the universities. And I think this is what what was very successful the last years. And if we now just look at 60,000 students doesn't sound a lot if you compare it to the US market of 6 million students but the various very very small compared to your country. And so we are yes, we think it's quite okay for German relations. And so what I mentioned before, I don't want to say it again, but three lines of funding, complete online courses and smart fall hobby learning material for blended learning on the micro level, which means to enhance and enrich the classroom teaching with digital materials and stored in a repositor repository and open fall hobby. We just starting in the next year with open offerings and open courses for an interested public also for future students who want to bridge knowledge gaps. Before they start studying for migrants and yes, for all the interested public and it's free free of charge. So we are now starting with more openness, as to say so and now Sandra, stop me if it's too early for the statements because I think you wanted to do it at the end of the discussion. So I can continue, but I don't know if it really fits to your program. Well, it's fine if we can do it later, but maybe to give them now so we can discuss upon that in our questions. So I propose that you continue. Okay, so we were asked to think about statements about the future of distance learning. And I have three very personal statements and it's a very subjective, subjective meaning the word of so statement number one is. And we mentioned it in different relations. Before the word of universities will change the campus campus goes digital and stays analog as well seems a little bit cryptic but I think we will have more transfer of knowledge of theory of content. Digital, and on the other side, the campus the classroom teaching will change. It will be more creative discussion spaces. We will have more workshops and more exchange of ideas between teachers and students. And so the word of digitization will change even the campus universities and even the face to face teaching at the universities. So statement number two is high education overcomes borders and becomes international multicultural and hyper flexible. So today it's all for example, with a full happy with a very virtual university. You're able to hear lecture at the university. You are not enrolled and you can collect ECTF and credit credit points at the university of your choice. And so the world is going to be smaller and bigger at the same moment. And this everything with digitization so without physical moving and without physical traveling which is very important. I don't want to talk about the global climate change but we have to think about another way of traveling. We are now, this is the best example what we are doing now. So we are together but we are at home to say. And the statement number three is there will be more transparency in education and the highest standard of quality. It was mentioned I think Irina you talked about quality or someone else. And so we made the experience we have a very elaborated quality management in our network organization. So all the courses are evaluated by experts, technical experts and experts concerning content. And this is something that teachers at the universities are not familiar with usually or actually they are not used to be evaluated by experts. They are used to be evaluated by students. This is where we are familiar with but this is something very new and we made the experience that these quality management in distance learning. Influences even the face to face teaching and the classroom teaching. So there will be a higher standard of quality and digitization means always to set standards. And so we can, we have more of a possibility to exchange really on a level we can compare. So these are my three statements and so I give back to Sandra and so do what you want with these statements. Okay, I think he said it was good, it was good. And now we come to Claudio to conclude this introductionary part. So Claudio, for his yours. Good afternoon and good morning to the American friends. Very happy to be in such a company. And I feel very very stimulated by what they heard that interacts with my funny task to finalize the introduction. When I started my activity in the 80s, distance education was already anticipating several what they would call modernity element that we are talking about now. First of all, flexibility of time and of course, flexibility of place, accessibility, personalization, recognition of learning of previous learning achievement and so openness to without the need of formal credentialization. And of course, use of technology, the technology of that time that was already ICP, a different form of ICP from the one we have now. But during these more than 30 years, distance education gained more respectability by getting, and in this I would like to take a little bit more on statement, became a little bit more rigid, became a little bit more similar to mainstream education. Also, thanks to quality assurance procedures and criteria that have made this more or less an obligation in order to be equally recognized as conventional education and talking mostly about higher education. Now the paradox is that in the same time, conventional mainstream education has adopted several solutions in order to become more flexible and more open. So some 15 years ago, we were expecting convergence. Now the convergence is not yet there, although we can see some new creature like relatively new creature like the Bayern virtual university that put together a constituency of mainstream institutions and the model that is typical of higher of distance education. What happened is that conventional mainstream education had adopted technology, but this is not the merit of ODL. I'm sorry to disagree on a single point with Irina. It's the merit of technology spreading in the society and so becoming an obligation also for education institutions. In fact, if we read the latest report from the European University Association, it says literally that ICT and they call it digitally supported learning has been adopted in a way or another by every higher education institution, but it has not made mainstream. That means that in spite of recognizing that there are a lot of good things in the ideas coming from distance education, mainstream education keeps a certain distance and adopts it as a sort of parallel pathway of education. Now, my point of view on this is that if the community of distance education that includes a lot of people that have adopted technology and models of distance education also in conventional institutions had so many good ideas and these so in line with the trends of society, why aren't we a little bit more daring and don't take our challenge simply to broaden a little bit our niche? Okay, 6 million students is a lot of students, but how many students don't follow distance education in the United States? 60,000 students in Bayern is a big number, but how many students are not in the virtual higher education in the same federal state? So I think really there is a challenge to come out a little bit, to be a little bit more daring and taking this also the last statements of made by Dean are in this direction. If we see that we are adopting before the others many important things that are in the evolution of society, why shouldn't we have more influence on mainstream? Why shouldn't we propose our model not only for those who are not comfortable in the conventional model, but there's an element of modern education, forget about distance and digital. Education needs to be personal, needs to be fitting on the needs of individual learners. We all know it, we discuss it since 50 years in research workshop. If you take the workshop of Barcelona where Irina was mentioning the session, these are all in our agenda, but not only in our community agenda. They are in the agenda of every learner who would like to learn comfortably and following her own interests and talents. Why isn't this applied in 80% of education that is being done as in the beginning of the 20th century when we are in the beginning of the next century? I think really there is a big issue there and then maybe in the second part I will come back with some other statement, but I would attract their attention on the challenge of having more influence and not just being happy because our niche is becoming a little bit bigger every year and people are recognizing that we were right 30 years before. We were right in the sense that we adopted earlier some principles that are now becoming more accepted. Being accepted doesn't mean that they are actually applied in a widespread way in conventional education and we have a role to play there. Thank you. Yeah, good summarizing the good topics, but just take from your point, so where is this gap between all of these possibilities of technologies and the mainstream education who is aware of it, but still have huge reluctance into acquiring and implementing them into educational process. So where is this gap? What is the issue? Where is the problem? Why do not we have so many teachers who are willing to try new things? Why are we still tackling with the number of students who do not take any kind of education actually or if they take it only face-to-face education? Why our high education institution or all institutions have such huge reluctance in making changes to adapting to new needs of our learners and the society? So can you recognize why is this happening? I'm opening the floor to our presenters, so if you would like to answer, please, who is willing to start. I'll start it out. I've traveled around the country for the last 20 years, meeting with educators. There is certainly, as Morton pointed out, there's a reluctance to change. Some of them, when you talk about just simple lecture capture, which to me is tremendously beneficial to go back and look at a lesson that was taught, and my notes might not have been up to par and I want to go and watch it again. Some instructors are very open to say, okay, go ahead and capture my lecture, but I'm not going to stream it live, two different things. I'll let you record it. I'll let you play it back on demand, but I want you in my classroom, my physical classroom, and that mentality has to change. I firmly agree we're in a generation of learners that will learn at their own pace. Think of that classroom model of, hey, I want to go and watch the content at my pace, and I want my instructor to be there to help answer my specific questions. And that's a big, big mindset shift for an instructor, especially one as Dean pointed out, not to be aged by it, but some of the instructors are a little bit older, and they're a little bit more set in their ways, and they just don't want to give it up. They don't want to try something different for change. And I think that has to happen. And the way that has to happen, it really has to be at the top of the institution. There has to be a policy put in place that says, this is the way we're going to go. And in the United States, a little tougher to be, it's easier said than done, because you have tenured professors and they'll say, well, no, it's my way or the highway. But I think that we have to somehow break past that point and have them realize that this is a much different way of learning for these students today. Steffi, you raised your hand. Thank you. So I think we can have a higher level of acceptance. We would be better accepted if we can communicate the need and the benefit. So if people, teachers and students see the need or they need the benefit, it's better. And I think a problem is our challenge is that you have on one side, you have open digital offerings. And this means a large, unspecified target group. And on the other side, you have individualized more and more individualized education histories. And so you have to bring this together on one side, a large target group. And on the other side, really, like you said, a really individual group, which want to have their own offerings. And I think what we have to, as our communities, we have to lead students through the jungle of offerings, because the internet is so huge and there is a lot. You can individualize your own education, but you have to find the right offerings. Thank you, Steffi. Irina, you raised your hand. You want to add? So I think I would add three things. One thing I agree that we don't have the offer, actually, that would meet the needs of the society, the learners that would join formal education. I agree with Claudia that the offer is very weak. I mean, we have a lot of innovations now. We have different forms of curriculum opened and offered. But if we look at it, and if we analyze it from the perspective of formal and informal and informal, the majority goes for informal learning online, which is uncontrolled. Then we have something for non-formal, which is not usually recognized in the formal education. And we have very few offers from formal education. Why? I would also stand for higher education organizations and formal education providers. In Europe, we are obsessed with several quality things, with the procurement, with the quality assessment. We have agencies working, you know, accrediting, checking, evaluating the program every three or six years, which is an amazing workload for academics. And, you know, despite of the fact that we need innovations, at the same time, we are overloaded with tasks on doing what we are already doing, as staff and faculty, as you call it, in the States. And another thing, you know, technology-driven innovations, technology-driven innovations, they come now in massive communication. We can imagine that leaders in LDL stand out and everybody is providing their offers, innovations, research projects online, and accessibility of this massive type of offers also make the academia to decide in a responsible way. So, by saying that we pick one and go deeper into one experiment and apply, I think it reflects a very normal concept of higher education, that's cool. Because we simply cannot manage, we choose a scalable way of adapting and implementing. And sometimes I think we overdo with the emphasizing and highlighting different, different innovations, like we had with MOOCs, for example, in Europe. And that's absolutely different from what you have in the States. And I would say these are two different approaches. And, you know, we pick up something and we put it into different contexts and different understanding, and then we play with it on a political level, on a formal education level, and then people are at a loss. So, I always feel that people will take them slowly, and I understand why it happens because I come from a university myself. But I wish to develop a more rapid offer, but I think the reason behind it is the one that I share with you now. Thank you, Irina, Dean. But just before you start, we have some questions in the chat, so please look at them as well. And also, I want to say to the participants, we have the poll here with the questions. We have questions in the poll as well. So, Dean, please comment. Mike, Dean, we cannot hear you. There we go. Still have problems with technology. May have something to do with my age as well. The one thing I would bring up is I would worry less about the full professors in life, the older professors, people may be more my age, about trying to convert them. I believe that this is somewhat generational. I also believe that while administrations can at times do top down, reality is in order for it to succeed, you are going to have to have faculty do buy it with this, that they need to buy into the concept. Leadership is critical at the top, but that collaboration needs to happen at the faculty level. And furthermore, the one thing I have heard at least in recent times is not so much the fear it is the issue at times. And that more support is needed for faculty members to help make things possible. I do believe there is interest in trying to evolve with all this. But also remember, most faculty members are not teachers like a K-12 teacher in terms of their training. They are learning through a different sort of way and teach in a different sort of way. So, I would believe, again, just kind of going back to it, while top down is important at a certain level, you have to have the buy in and the collaboration from the faculty, and particularly the younger faculty in there to take that type of leadership. Thank you, Dean. So, we have created a question from Alastair. Many learners have no idea how to learn online and in lots of support to get started. How we can support this? Any volunteers to answer this question? Or maybe you can type it in the chat. The next question is from Eba about quality. Why is always high demand on quality in online learning than more than in traditional courses at the campus? So, usually we do not have peer reviewing on quality of courses in the campus, but we ask for quality of online courses. There is a pros and cons there. And the question is about, Ignace asks about online learning in regards to European standards and guidelines for quality insurance and high education. How should it be pursued to have online and distance learning in some way covered in it? And in what way? So, different questions. So, would you like to comment on any of these questions? I'll take a stab at the online versus the onsite quality measurements. I think, again, because it's newer to a degree. And I think there's still a kind of a belief out there that online learning is not as high of quality as when you're physically there on premise. I think there's still that stamina out there, that stigma. But, you know, it should be measured, I firmly believe it should be measured both ways for sure. And as time goes on, you know, I'm a firm believer in the AI movement that, you know, eventually, in my opinion, instructors to a large degree are, their roles are going to change. And AI is going to have a big play in that in the forms of robots. And it's real if you haven't followed that movement and go and start doing a little bit of research on what robots are capable of doing right this minute and what their role is going to be in the future. I think you're going to see instructors programming robots basically to act as themselves. And, you know, the, but back to that question, I really feel that it is because online is still considered not as good as traditional. And I think that's why there's a higher level of interrogation and quality measurement for the, for the online results. But personally, I would like to hear what my colleagues think. I think it should be measured equally, whether it's visible or online. Claudio, maybe you would like to comment on this question of Ignas, or Ignas, about online learning in regard to European standards and guidelines for quality insurance in high education. I'm not sure I'm 100% updated. I know there was a significant attempt a couple of years ago to bring the issue of technology and open and distance learning into the European standards and guidelines. As far as I know, the latest version of 2015 doesn't contain any reference to it with the based on the principle that what applies to normal education also applies to learning, let's say. Nevertheless, I'm sure that PEDBA has worked on this and there are some development, probably PEDBA is better than me in giving you updates and answers on this. As far as I'm concerned, I really think there is a lot of self-protection in the criteria that are used by quality assurance and accreditation agencies because not so much in Europe, but especially in America. Distance education has been associated with commercial as opposed to public, especially in Southern America, but also a little bit in Northern America. And public universities have felt the need to defend themselves from emerging private, to a large extent, distance education by setting standards for quality that only apply to presents in higher education and they cannot be achieved in any way by distance education. So distance education is obliged to have buildings and number of permanent teachers that are not functional to the business model just because they need accreditation. And that is a dynamic that honestly I think we should definitely overcome in the 21st century and the state that although there is a clear need to defend a public good principle in education is not because an offered education is provided privately or by distance that it needs to be inferior to another. It may be less research intensive, but it really depends on what the learner are looking for. And that is another issue I think that for which we should as a community fight a little bit because the next addition of the standards and guidelines are open to technology-based technology and has not rather resistant to it. But we tried several times in the past with modest success I have to say, even with SQL as you may remember. Claudia Morton, you wanted to comment on this. Yes, thank you Sandra. I have several experiences from Norway now that I think are also seen in many other countries. It is related to when mainstream institutions want to be more flexible. They often acquire, merge with or buy smaller distance education institutions because they want to learn from the flexibility and the models and the pedagogy, the smaller flexible institutions have. But what actually is happening is that since the traditional institutions are the big brothers, they have more money, more resources, then they start to change the flexible institutions into their model, making not use of the good experience the smaller institutions have. For example, we see a lot of institutions that have developed very good learning platforms or made their learning platforms very well suited for distance education. And when they are merged with the larger institutions, they have to use the standard learning management system that the larger institution has. They have to adapt to the standards that the larger institution has. So I've seen a number of institutions that have had a lot of good experiences with dealing with distance education for many years. Now being kind of swallowed and more or less stopped doing the good work they do because these larger mainstream institutions kind of take them over and force their models on them. We are already exceeding our planned time, so we need to conclude all of the discussion just started actually. But maybe to short summarize and conclude, to each of you with one sentence and saying yes or no, what is in your opinion is distance education is future of education? So yes, no, and why? In short, and while you're thinking a little bit, I'll put the poll so that people can put their thoughts also on this webinar. What is their thought? They are leaving this webinar today. So for panelists, is distance education future of education? Yes or no? And why do you think that? Who is going to be first pet? Maybe you start. I think it's strong. I do think it might change a little bit. I know a lot of people think distance learning, they always associated it with synchronous, you know, having a real time aspect to it. I think they're going to see more and more of that asynchronous combined with the synchronous. So there is going to be that piece of it, learning delivered at a far, delivered at a distance in an asynchronous manner for learning the topic. But I think you're always going to have the synchronous piece or follow up and asking questions and whatnot. That's that's where I see it really headed with that AI aspect added to it. Thank you. What is your opinion? Inevitable and evolutionary. I believe that it is inevitable and it's evolutionary that what's going to happen with distance education. It is going to continue to happen. It's going to grow. It is somewhat a matter of time. And furthermore that it will continue to be worldwide. But I also believe that faculty members will continue to exist. And they will be with us. They were just going to be a part of the process on how teaching is done. They're going to be a very big part. What is your. Thank you. So I think the future. I think we have a little bit later. So I think the future of distance learning is that we won't talk about distance learning anymore. We talk about education at all. I think both parts raise and I think that they come together more and more and we do not have these differences between distance learning and learning in a classroom. So I think this will be the word of education in the future time. Would you like to comment? Yes, please. I do believe in online and distance education, of course, and I really think it will be more global in the future. I did predict that 30 years ago as well. But I really see that the education across national borders is growing and I think it will continue to do that. Thank you, Claudia. Well, if you use your terms, I can say yes, I believe distance education will be education that I think in fact we need the personal element made clear in order to to unite the two and the personal education will be education. It will use technology. But in order to get to that point of that safety is mentioning of getting to union, we need to be a little bit more daring. We said the many reasons why mainstream education is not adopting 100% our approach. It's also a little bit our shyness in showing how related to the future is the innovation that we propose. In a sense, we have been too modest in staying in our niche, in our niche that is growing and growing and we are satisfied and complacent in recognizing that the trends are there. But I think we should be also more organized and more daring in selling within inverted brackets the changes that we have already experienced to mainstream education. And Irina, to conclude this statement. I think actually that flexible, open and online learning will be the future. And I think it will be the reality for the mainstream of the society. And in my understanding, formal education providers need to learn to recognize flexible, open and online learning. And as if they prepare offers, that would be for the good. But I don't believe that completely online learning in form of settings will dominate. And I would argue for the possibility for the teacher to choose the best way. So that we don't count indicators in terms of other things, but the teacher decision, but the teacher digital proficiency is a must and flexibility. I am against standard, rigid solutions for quality assurance. If they will continue, teachers will not develop any offers at all. Thank you Irina. And let me conclude this webinar. What I think is very important that we do raise questions and discussion about these topics. This is why Eden and organization like USDLA and IDE have important role as I would say leaders of networking and communications and discussions on this topic. Because only by discussing and collaboration, we can make things change actually. Because people often miss understanding of things and this is one of the major reasons why they are against something. So I wish to thank you all for participating today for a really good discussion. If we have more time, I think we will even have a bigger discussion and more questions. But I will conclude this today thanking you all. We will post the recordings of the session on our even web page. And maybe the next year we continue where we stopped in this webinar. So thank you again all of you panelists and the participants for being with us today. Thank you.