 Hi everyone, I'm going to take some time to test the mic and the loudness of my voice. We're going to talk to you about a project, a very special project that we're working on. My colleague, Mark Elalami, he's our Mural Administrator and Ion Carolina Sandoval. He's a learning specialist at the University of Luxembourg, but we're working on a project called University. So a few months ago, we asked ourselves a question, if you got to design your learning ecosystem from scratch, what would you do? No administrative constraints, no, this is the way we've done it for the past 20 years, therefore we keep on doing it. No, this is what the structure is like right now. We had an opportunity to think out of the box and decide every single element we could include for our community. So next, I don't know if you were in the earlier presentation by the European Commission. I felt a bit nervous because she made this great image of European universities and how we are the future. European universities are uninitiated by the European Commission. So we are five, not six, but we're five universities where European, which means that we have to work in a transnational environment. We promote European culture, values and education. We're trying to revolutionize higher education, so we're trying to come up with different ways that we can define programs and create learning opportunities. And as you can imagine, we're highly reliant on technology. We have students in different locations, lecturers in different locations. Every member is participating in different ways and we need to have a place to put this. So we also had the choice to choose the learning platform as well, the LMS. So one of the biggest challenges we had within this context from the beginning is how can we ensure that all these students will stick to our programs? Because it is optional to take these courses. For most students, they are re-enrolled into a different program in a university. So this is an opportunity for them to try something new with a lot of scary elements. This is based on some actual pedagogical research on online education, distance learning, what our students fears. We all talk about MOOC education, like MOOC programs, but when you read that more than 90% of students drop out of the course and it's mostly based on isolation. So we didn't want our students to have to go through this. Over 40% of students, they need face-to-face interactions, even if it's in a virtual environment. In our context, it's very difficult to ensure this. So we asked ourselves, how can we use an LMS, in this case we chose Moodle for many reasons, that will support our students through this process. And I'll let you think about your context, because these numbers were actually before the pandemic. So all these students that before the pandemic already have said, I do not want to try an online course because I need interactions and I need to connect with people. Suddenly had to do it. So our focus was virtual learning communities. We decided that we would use Moodle, because we were able to customize as much as possible our learning platform for a virtual learning community. We felt that this would help students through the process and when they're on those situations where they cannot connect with someone, they had alternatives. We have five universities, many universities, but we also have multiple institutions associated with their universities. So we actually have in total nine institutions right now and we're expanding for the next stage. Reality is that not every single student has the same access to technology. We have a digital device and higher education in Europe, even if people are not aware of it. We wanted to be able to set up the system for students, no matter what technology they have, whether they lack the technology to still contact any member to ask for support. We wanted to be able to center like resources. Not every university has access to the same type of licenses or the same type of software. We wanted to provide training for all these professors in different universities because we cannot control what our universities are doing or how they are developing their courses. So we needed to take care of this as well. When we talk about innovative pedagogical approaches, as we said, we are still trying many things and most of our lectures will not be delivered in a classroom to a group of students. They might be in different combinations, some of them might be pre-recorded, some of them might be virtual. We don't know because every single course is unique and there is no set structure or rules. So as Caroline said, we were lucky to start from scratch, so we had no constraint about migrating data from a platform to another. And we had experience in using Moodle. So we were able to focus on the needs of the platform of today's and the future. So what did we know at the start? We need some digital mobility. So a student following a course in a country should be able to coordinate, collaborate with students or teachers of other countries. The platform should allow to combine in-person and distance learning. A teacher can give a course in the University of Toulouse in-site with students in-site while other students from other countries should follow the same course online. And the difficulty is also that the different universities use different tools for streaming. Toulouse uses Zoom, University of Luxembourg is using Webex. So this is some difficulty. And so for the scalability, we started with small courses attached to the program of each university. But this course will grow, more users will enroll and more courses will be created. Everybody should be able to create its own account, so we cannot predict how many users we will have in a year or two. And as Karolina said, we are two new universities joining in the coming months. So Moodle offers a wide range of technology and solutions. We spent some time in adapting the current roles available in Moodle and creating new ones for each type of user. So from the student to the teacher or instructional designer or even the data private officer. We created all this course and adapted based on the respect of the GDPR. So and for the plugins, we based on our experience of the University of Luxembourg platform, we selected the most useful and used plugins. We made the selection because some plugins were very old and not GDPR compliant anymore. And we installed, with the new one we wanted to install, we made sure that they had the privacy friendly logo or that there was no problem with the data transfer with the plugins. For the login, we used, we choose the SAML2 single sign-on plugin from Catalyst. This plugin allow any members of the consortium to create an account on our platform while connecting with his own university home, university credentials. So this is very, very good for us because we don't have to manage the account. And for the cohorts, with a combination of plugins, we managed to create cohorts and groups based on the different institution. We had, so the cohorts allow the institution to directly connect with their own students on the platform. So in some circumstances, students don't have access to computers. So we made sure that all, when we set the model that it was all compatible and adapted to a mobile phone. So while choosing the template or adapting the course template, we were always testing it or adapting it to a phone display. And finally, for the GDPR compliance. So the world, all the world was defined with permission based on the GDPR. And we created also a policy notice with the help of the data private officer of the University of Luxembourg. So it was, it's based on the Luxembourg law, which is a bit difficult in this, in this circumstances has different countries are involved. So different laws and data is transferred from a country to another. And the policy, the policy notice, take that. Okay, so we put some images because they look pretty as well. Just so you get a glimpse, we also have the link to our Moodle platform. So you can see afterwards how it's been set up. One of the important things of European universities and especially with our project is to give back to society. So this project actually started in 2020, November 2020. We kind of officially launched, but we had a temporary Moodle then that was a bit not as functional. And it did not incorporate the elements we want to provide right now. For example, when you arrive to the Moodle, you see the space dictionary, the dictionary of space concepts. This was actually developed by students or focus is space research and development. All our programs focus on that. And we're trying to work on developing tools and resources with the focus on space that others can use. For example, high school students can come in here and find terms specific to space. Fine, we right now we're doing the languages of all the universities. So we have an English. So we have French, of course, English. We have Swedish because we have also Sweden, part of the project. Polish and German. So when you go in there, you can find terminology translated in all languages and explanations. We also have the available courses as a catalogue because, again, we want to attract students but also educators. We want teachers to be able to to want to join these programs. Right now, accessing the courses is limited to, of course, our alliance members. But we're also hoping that this will develop into MOOC-like courses afterwards that anyone can take to do their own professional growth and development. So yes, we have the announcement section where we have everything is not just about events related to our alliance is also space related events. If there's a consortium, people send us this information and we share it in the front page so anyone has access to it. We also have language courses that anyone who is from the alliance can take the language courses for no additional costs and our partner in German in the University of Düsseldorf, HSU, is providing out of the language courses for free for all our students. And yes, the MOOC-like where we're working on developing it, but right now it's lecturers who offer the content for free for anyone to be able to follow them. And the learning community, the next one. So if anyone saw the good, the bad and the ugly workshop, we were there and we're kind of pleased that we actually were nailing some of the spots. At the University of Luxembourg, we have had the teachers' corners for a really long time. This is a community base for educators course where we have different types of resources. We have open forums where teachers can post resources. They can ask for additional support on something and pretty much exchange ideas. We have lots of tutorials between quick how-tos to more advanced tools that they can use in Moodle. We also have a section explaining, we create an activity catalog because you can try to convince the teacher to use a specific activity, but until they see it, they might not know that they need it. So we actually create a catalog with every single plugin we have in our Moodle, a sample of how could be used, instruction and additional information. We have a tech support system. Again, we have professors that are everywhere in Europe, so it's not as simple as going and knocking on your tech office to ask for supports. We have all kinds of repositories for resources that teachers can use between images to templates for presentations. I don't know how I'm doing with time. I'm good. If you want to check it out, especially the dictionary, this has been a lot of work. We're using the Glossary activity for it, but we're also developing a database activity to collect information. Our goal is that at some point any member of the European community can add terms into this dictionary. I think we're good. Questions? Thank you. Thank you very much. We have time for questions, so please raise your hands and we'll take questions. Hi, and thank you for this amazing show of your work. I have two questions that don't belong to each other. The first one is, have you already done another poll with the students? How they like online learning now that you improved it in that special way? The other question is, how big is the administrative part of dealing with all those teachers with their needs and different specialities? That's all. Thank you. We just launched our first set of courses. We have 18 courses right now that are interdisciplinary and all of them combined have to have at least two partner universities. So we just got students enrolled, so I cannot give you feedback on that, but some of the teachers, because I work directly with the teachers as well, they have told me, I wish my university would do this for us. So to me, as an in-learning specialist, that's the greatest feedback I can get. Regarding administration, it was decided at the beginning of the project that every university would hire an instructional designer. So I was hired as an instructional designer for the University of Luxembourg, but also as a person helping with the implementation of Moodle, I do a lot of one-to-one with the instructional designers and with the teams of professors as well, because sometimes a course will last one semester, but then you have two professors, two instructional designers, plus all the lecturers involved in it, and I have to work with them. Any other questions? So you said that in order for a course to be able to be made, at least two universities have to sign on to it. Once the course is initially made, can you reuse that course after, like you have one semester, and then can you use that same course again the following semester? There's nothing preventing us from doing that, but in most cases, every course proposed is attached to an existing program. So usually, if two universities propose a new course that is connected to different master programs, it also has to be interdisciplinary. So we have law, like an example is satellite communication, business, and law. So you bring universities together, and it's just one semester for the different universities. Do you have any information about how this has impacted teaching and learning across Europe, whether anecdotal, or what have you heard in response to this program? I mean, everyone who is involved in the program is technically volunteering. Every professor who joins in, they're joining because they want to try something innovative, and then they share it with their colleagues. So at the beginning, you start with a small group of people, and we're slowing attracting more people, and sometimes we receive emails from professors who say, like, hey, I heard from this person that you were working on this project. I want to try it too, or I want my students to have these opportunities, access to these kind of lectures. And we also have lecturers that when they see the proposals, they ask me, can I attend? Like, I'm really interested in all these things. I mean, many times as an educator, you have ideas of things you want to do, but you don't know how to channel it. So we're trying to do that.