 As I said, we are very happy to have you all here. We are in during the Open Education Week in 2022. And we have a series of webinars the whole week organized by Eden. And today we are going to have a very nice discussion about digital experience in technical higher education. In the meantime, I see we also have people from Sweden and Austria, welcome. In these times, we believe that the unity of higher education in Europe has been seen. And we all want to focus on doing our parts in shaping the minds of young people. Because through education, we can conquer far more than through other means, which are not so good. So as I said, we are here to talk about the digital experience in technical higher education. In the past two years, everyone transitioned to online learning. And the specialists and professionals from technical higher education, technical universities were already prepared. They had good experiences. We will see some of these professionals sharing these experiences today. And because even after the pandemic time, we are sure digital technologies in education will remain in use, we think that this type of topic is very useful for us. I'm going to introduce now, first myself. I am Vlad Mihaescu. I'm coming from the Polytechnic University of Timishwara. I am the Eden Network of the Academics and Professional Steering Committee Chair. The Eden Network of Academics and Professionals is organizing this webinar during this week. And we are building the community of professionals inside the Eden larger community. The first speaker, which I'm going to introduce, and it gives me a very big pleasure to do this, is a very close mentor and collaborator of mine for the past more than 10 years. I'm talking about Diana Andone. If you have been involved already in Eden activities, you probably know Diana. She has been involved with Eden for a very, very long time. She is currently in the Council of Fellows Board. Diana is coming from the Polytechnic University of Timishwara, where she is the director of the e-learning center. And she's deeply involved in strategies for digital technologies and online education, not only in the university, but I would say in the whole city and region. Also, she is a member of IEEE. And last year, she was distinguished with the Education Society Chapter Leadership Award. Finally, Diana is also a senior fellow of Eden. And it gives me, as I said, a very big pleasure to hear what she has to present. Diana, please, the floor is yours. Thank you very much for this. Let me start sharing my screen. So we go directly in presentation mode. Please let me know that everything is right. Perfect. Good. Good. Perfect. So I'm going to speak about digital experiences in technical higher education with a focus on the activities which we are doing now in the Polytechnic University of Timishwara. And thank you very much, Vlad, for your nice and kind words. A lot of these things which I'm going to present here, Vlad is also deeply involved in creating and producing them. So we can say it's a joint presentation in this kind. And in one moment, some of the projects which we are doing is also involving two other of the co-presenters from today. So from where everything started, back 12 years ago, we came up with this idea of how we are building up the digital education of the university. And I presented several times. I'm not going to focus too much on that, just to give you the framework. So that's the framework in which we are developing and we are doing this now. How you build it up, obviously, based on a vision, structuring, and policies, but mainly on community and then on the validation. Because you need people to be able to build it up. And also, you need to check what you're doing. So benchmarking analysis is part of everything what you need to do if you really want to be able to build up digital education. And as in the technical universities, we are focusing quite a lot on that. Back in about seven years ago, we started this idea how really we can build up the open lifelong learning students. This came up somehow from the past, from the mid 2000, when I was doing my PhD and I was focusing on the digital students. So I came up with some new ideas and we tried to build up this based on open online learning. Basically introducing and using a lot of MOOCs in our traditional higher education. And I'm going to speak also about a project which is also doing that. I'm focusing obviously on virtual campus, on production of open educational resources and also on involving students as co-creators. On virtual mobilities, we're starting doing this since 2008 and more recently on micro-credentially, also small courses, small webinars for the training, continuous professional development and so on. So what I'm going to speak now is a tiny bit of this which is the digital transformation. And mainly I will focus on the competencies and on the community part of it. And I will not focus only for the academic staff also for non-academic staff or students and also how you involve the external stakeholders in this. So these are the ideas which I'm going to present today. I will come back to this later. I just want to have it here also as a roundup of this. So I will go further through all of them. First, how you focus on training because that's the first bit which you will need to do to create this community and this competencies of all your stakeholders. Obviously, the first bit is continuous professional development. You do that training through tutorials, through constant support and also through a lot of nowadays webinars in the past also face-to-face, how to say, training sessions. So you need to have that schedule and program and not only for the academic staff also for the students, also when they are the first year but also when they are the final year. So continuous. It doesn't mean in what stage of their development there. You still need to have a sort of training and support for that. For that, you build the digital education competencies and you need to focus quite a lot on the new digital pedagogies. This is, for example, a graph which is one year old now. We are still producing the other graph which will show the last two years which just shows how many of those resources were developed only in one year in our universities. And I will just try to figure out about this. 20,000 new interactive resources were produced by our staff and students and for all of those, we thank them a lot. So the other bit is building up open online learning and creating that sort of environment where the community really can be developed because one is the level of the training which you give inside the university and one is how you involve also the outside stakeholders into your courses and to validate them also externally. So for that, we built up back in 2016, the Unicampus platform where also Vlad was deeply involved. In fact, it was his PhD thesis. So how we have done this in the digital transformation and building up strongly the community is we had a lot of webinars together online. We ran 30 webinars last year and now we are running the webinars of sharing together where we have thousands of participants. We had last year more than 10,000 participants, around 150 presenters and a lot of partner institutions involved. So that's how you create the community and how you validate the things which you are doing. Obviously, we introduce microcredits also for this type of informal learning which are not really training, but it's more to create that sense of being part of a transformative community and validating the knowledges which you have which were done for the webinars. Students as co-creators, I kept mentioning that a lot. Once you start involving the students as co-creators and especially once you start showing them how to create open educational resources, that will really enhance the quality of your education, the quality of the delivery, but mainly it will motivate your students to do a tiny bit more, to go that extra mile where they can really do different things or where they can really engage themselves into the educational process and where they also are able to reflect on what they are doing or learning, right, and what they can still improve by themselves. Now, something about the support and the training and how you built up these webinars and consultation and online support which you need to have and how you build these new digital technologies. And here it comes, the Maudite Project in which also DINI is involved, the Kounos University of Technologies, one of the partners together with the other technical universities including University of Porto and it's a project run by Fahoshil Dmitolstam. What we have done in Maudite, we try to focus on how you are using open online learning, especially MOOC techniques and pedagogies in higher education, especially in technical higher education, how you can improve based on that. So what we have done, we developed an online self-assessment tool so you know first where you are and what you need to do, then we built up the open online training program, then we are now already having several courses, I've seen 14 different courses in all of our universities where the curricula and the content and materials were redesigned based on this MOOC learning and MOOC pedagogies and now we are in the phase of pilot, the final pilot effect and the evaluation. So something about the Maudite online training program, this is supported by the KTU platform at this moment and these are the five learning modules on foundation, on MOOC course design, MOOC content production, how you deliver MOOCs and obviously how you build up MOOCs in formal learning and as I said, in the traditional higher education. At this moment, the courses are on KTU but soon they are going to be on diversity and we are going to share that information when it's going to be available. At this moment, as I said, we have 20 professors and courses which are adapted and changed in the different universities and what it came out as a major, how to say outcome of this project or at least for our university is that a lot of professors have developed the new skills for where they can implement even the tiny bit of changes like until now they will put some or some resources online on the university virtual campus and they will encourage the students to use them. Now they are really creating the activities around those resources and that's probably the biggest shift in their skills and mentality on how to deliver the courses especially when you are looking at the open techniques, open education techniques. The other one is mentoring. We strongly believe in mentors and in role models and in best practices. If you remember from the first slide where I put the UPT, the Our University Digital Education, I strongly emphasize that you need to create obviously the community and that you start from the early adopters and then you have those which are the trailblazers and then you really need the digital education ambassadors and for that you need role models and mentors and you need to encourage that. So from these ideas came up this augmented teaching through blended learning Erasmus Plus project which we are calling Academia where we are really trying to build up more and focus more on this mentorship for digital education. These are the partners again, co-speakers in this presentation coming from University of Pogtor. Obviously a lot of technical universities is again focusing for the technical higher education on how to do that. What we are doing this is obviously where that's the end goal to try to accelerate the digital readiness of the technical higher education institutes institutes with this new profile of the educators and for this we are really looking for the for training the mentors and then bringing Academia to life which will mean at least 100 trainees which are going to be mentored by the mentors in all the partner universities. So something about that we have done already a kit which is an analyze also at national level and then building up at international level that analyze how we are going to reinvent the role of the academics in the digital education universities and how you do that grasping obviously the use of the most recent open pedagogical tools. The tools which we analyze because that we focus on the pedagogical tools and also sorry on the pedagogical math and then also the pedagogical tools. These are the tools which we analyze and we identify that they we need more supported training which can be used for different levels of the education system. And we have built up now and we are trying to finalize as soon as going to be public the mentors training course and the handbook which is the course is going to be delivered from May and then we are going to have for establishing these mentors and then in each university and then we are going to have the trainees involved starting with the new academic year of 2002 and 2023. So how we are looking at what we are looking in this training course and the handbook at the soft and transversal skills and how you are building up also for the mentors but also for the trainees on the digital education skills and also what are the methods on which you can give support and mentoring for everybody. We built there are two frameworks which we are thinking into consideration for this. One is obviously the big comp which the digital competence framework for educators developed by the European Union which in fact is going to give us the framework and the validity also for the certificates and the open badges which the mentors and the trainees are going to gain at the end of this project and also on the ABC to really Erasmus Plus project but mainly on the ABC learning design where you are looking at the different tools and support and also pedagogical models for acquisition, collaboration, discussion, investigation, practice and production. So for each of them we will identify the tools, best practices and also how you can go to implement them through mentors or through one to one delivery not through large training programs that's the difference in which we have now for the mentorship project which we believe that those role models really can change a bit more than just simple training courses. The mentor course as I said is built up on this educator specific digital competencies and he looks at professional engagement as I said, digital resources, teaching and learning, also assessment, empowering the learners and facilitating the learner digital competencies and we hope we are going to improve the emotional intelligence also of the educators, the mentoring skills but also the personal competencies. This is the mentor profile as we are looking at and how we are building it up and as you say, the largest things are basically those which we consider more important and what we are going to look and encourage the mentors to be. So now towards the end, that's how you built up in our opinion at least the competencies and the communities around digital transformation. I only gave you three examples, one with co-creators and also with deep involvement and training and webinars for everybody and how you use MOOCs in the traditional higher education and how you built up mentors besides another extra level based on the training and the continuous professional development. So basically based on this, you really can find solutions which will bring even further. So we are now almost closing the contacts but we will still need to have a huge focus of the digital education and these are the lessons which we have learned especially from the last two years and which we already tested. So we know that they are going to work and hopefully they are going to last and the professors and the students are going to use them and they are going to be really implemented into the future and will validate even further the importance of the digitalness into the higher education. And this is obviously quite strongly in the view as I said with our university digital education strategy but also with the digital education action plan developed by the European Union and soon to be launched the digital education hub which is exactly focusing on the community's aspect. That's the team which is making everything possible. You can also see Vlad there. So he's, as I said, he was also deeply involved in this and if you have further ideas and further things, please let me know and please ask questions in the Q&A and I'll be happy to answer. And I don't know if I need to say this now but Vlad or you are going to say it at the end. Please do if it's up the screen. Okay. I'm encouraging you to come to the Eden annual conference in Tallinn. We are hoping we are going to meet face to face again for two years. The first online conference was in Kimishara in 2020 then in 2021 we got again virtually to Madrid. Let's hope that Tallinn is going to join us together. So we are really looking again at the same thing on how we shape the digital transformation of the education ecosystem in Kimishara. And obviously we are living very difficult times nowadays. I think we really need to support all the academics, all of us, we are doing a tiny bit of work to try to support the universities, especially those which are university professors and students which are now refugees coming to Romania all of the neighboring countries and trying to give them as much as possible support and integration after that. So they can still have a sort of normal life even not to say after all the distress they faced recently. Thank you very much for this. And thanks Vlad for this. Thank you, Diana. Very interesting presentation and strong finish with the message. I saw an interesting question in the Q&A and maybe we can try a quick answer now. It's a question from Alastair. Choosing tools that comply with RAMS and GDPR is rather difficult as most of them store data outside the EU. Did you find any tools which are safe in this respect? Yes, one of the things which we looked at a lot of the tools which for example I showed you that a lot of them are nowadays having this sort of interface that you can really install on your own university servers. I'm not saying about Moodle, MoodleNet and also for example, Skype, you can install it or also communicate open online forums and so on which you can put on your university networks. Also the other ones like the Hoot and Contura you also can install. So a lot of them have in the GitHub or even on their own website. Further developments which allow you to put it on the university server. So that will completely cut out the non-EU interface. Obviously what's the pitfall for that? You need staff who knows what they're doing and who knows how to support and what they need to do and you need also the technical development to be able to do that. So it's not an easy path if you really want to stay independent of that and open and probably that's the biggest problem which openness faces at this moment that you need staff, very well trained staff you need technical development support because the possibilities are there but they're not that easy. The easiest solution is always to go online and use the things which already exist. So I don't have a perfect solution, I only have ideas. Thank you. I hope this will satisfy at least partially Alistar and his question. I encourage everyone to continue asking questions in the Q&A section. Thank you, Diana. We will come back to you in the end of the session for the Q&A part. Thank you. I will move now to the second speaker of the day and I'm very happy to present Gustavo Alves. He's coming from Polytechnic of Porto and he teaches there and also he is the head of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Industrial Technology. Also he has hundreds of publications related to education, engineering and remote laboratories as well. And I want to say that he's also involved in IEEE like Diana. He is IEEE Latin American Learning Technologies Journal AE. I'm very happy, as I said, to introduce Gustavo. Gustavo, please, I'm looking forward to hearing your presentation. Thank you, Vlad. It's a pleasure and above all, thank you for the opportunity to, well, speak with you about what is my research interest about remote and virtual labs. So I'll try to share my screen right now. Okay, and let me put my presentation. Is it okay? Yes, perfect. Okay, thank you. So dual idea and this was the reason for the invitation. I want to share with you some knowledge and the ideas about using remote and virtual labs in technical higher education. So first of all, I'm from the Polytechnic of Porter School of Engineering. It's this red dot that you can see there on the globe. It's really on the very end of Europe on the western part. And the outline for my presentation is this one. It's very simple, five points. I want to make a distinction about hands-on, remote and virtual labs. Okay, so that's it's clear to everybody. Then I will talk about trends in engineering education. Then I will go to the fundamental objectives of engineering instruction laboratories. Why do we use laboratories in engineering education? And then I will go to remote and virtual labs as teaching and learning environments. Why can, how can we use this new types of labs in engineering education? And I will give an example and try to involve you in this example, okay? So this whole idea of remote and virtual labs comes from two criteria that were proposed by Sebastian Dormido. So if you distinguish remote from local and real from virtual, you end up with a classification in four different items. So real local labs are what we call hands-on lab. You have to go to the lab, you have to enter a room and you have the equipment there. So everything is real, but you need to go there. If you move to the remote part, then you have remote labs. That means that you are accessing real equipment from your computer, your smartphone, okay? You have real equipment, we have real responses from nature. Your idea is that you have computer mediated access to that equipment. If you move to the simulation part, you can have two part, two hypothesis. How do you need to go to a lab because the software is installed there and you call this a simulation, okay? Or you can access that simulation through your computer or smartphone and then you call it a virtual lab, okay? So two simple criteria, real remote local, sorry, real simulated, remote local. And if you combine, you have this distinction. Now talking about transient engineering education, I'll give you three very simple documents. One from Freud one content Smith that was written in 2011 and 2012 where they analyzed one under the years of papers, articles about engineering education. So this was in the Sentinel proceedings of the IEEE. The other one is a report, NEMC report 2017. I will explain why I went to 2017. And then this global state of the art in engineering education report that was written by Ruth Schram in 2018. If you go to this first document, the five major shifts in 100 years of engineering education are a year. And the last one is a shift to integrating information, computational and communications technologies in education. And if you go to this specific shift, you will see that there are several movements in this shift. One of them is the content deliverable, first through television, videotape and then through the internet. So you can see here how Eden is referred here as one of the components in this shift. But you can also see simulations and remote laboratories here, okay? So they are part of this shift of integrating ICT in engineering education. If you look into the NEMC horizon report in 2017, so this is about five years ago, you will see different trends, challenges and developments. And you will see that one of the developments is two adaptive learning technologies and using remote and virtual laboratories. It is really the last sentence here. And you see that they were predicting the time to adoption horizon was one year or less when we were in 2017. So we are actually five years away from that. But one thing is predicting, like simulating, the other thing is the reality. So actually COVID did it better. More than anything else, COVID was a driving force to the adoption of virtual and remote labs to digitalization, et cetera, okay? And nobody was predicting COVID. So many institutions are actually now using remote and virtual labs as part of emergency educational responses. So we had to adapt very fast. And we have seen this in the previous presentation of Diana, okay? The other paper that I was referring is the fundamental objectives of engineering instruction laboratories. What do engineering students go to the lab to? Why do they go there? Why do we use labs? And it basically, Faisal and Rosa proposed a set of certain fundamental objectives. They are listed on the paper. And I give you just two examples, instrumentation. We go to the lab because we need to understand how to use instruments, how to make measurements, okay? How to measure physical quantities. The other reason why we go to a lab is that because we have models in our head, for instance, the law of gravity. Let something and drop something it will be attracted to another mass that is the mass of the earth, et cetera, ohms law. So we have these conceptual models in our mind and we need to make experiments to make sure that these models are accurate. They work, okay? So the other thing is models. Identify the strengths and limitations of serial medical models as predictors of real-world behaviors. And there are more 11 fundamental objectives. So if you combine these three different types of laboratories and you understand that in the middle the student has to make some calculus when moving from a remote to a virtual to a hands-on, you will see that the competencies of the teachers have to increase quite much. A teacher is a central point on this because he has to propose learning tasks. He has to help the guidance of students through these different environments so that students acquire experimental competence so that students learn more. And they learn more by doing experiments, okay? So the only idea is to facilitate doing experiments. That's crucial in the engineering education. You have a number of papers here that give you an idea, the trial lab, the impact of remote and virtual access to hardware upon the learning outcomes, et cetera. So how is the world in this, to this respect? We can see some examples, okay? Remote labs that you can use for free in Brazil, a company that is placed in Spain, La Absland. You have also this huge European approach called Go Lab where you also have a number of educational resorts based on simulations and remote labs that you can use. And you have this national project in India that gathers all the India, almost all the Indian institutes of technology called virtual arts. So you have a number of examples and resources that you can know and use. So what I'm going to do now is give you an example of one particular remote lab called Visir. Visir stands for Virtual Instruments Systems in Reality. It was developed by Professor Iqbalist Gustavson who passed away in 2017. And he had this vision that was inspired in Max Planck that an experiment is a conversation with nature. When you make an experiment, you are making a question to nature. And when you do a measurement, you are recording the response of nature. So every measurement is a recording of the answer of nature. And you can do this in a real lab and zone or you can do this in a remote lab. And that was his motivation for developing Visir. So basically Visir that is here in this image is a remote lab where you have a multimeter, a functional generator, an oscilloscope, and you have a DC power supply, and you have a breadboard where you can actually mount real circuits with real components. So you can see on this different image that the breadboard, it's a digital representation of a real matrix where you have the components inserted there. So when you mount a circuit on your computer, this circuit will be mounted on a real matrix that is placed in Porto, in Sweden, whatever, okay? But you need access to real equipment. You can see here the different implementations of Visir. So when you do a real experiment in Visir, this can be done in Costa Rica, in Argentina, in Brazil, in Australia, in Spain, in Sweden, in Austria. So wherever there is a Visir laboratory, an experiment is being made there. So your idea is that when you engage in a certain class with a student, okay, maybe you want to show the difference between a simulation, a real experimentation, et cetera. So the whole idea is that now we can, let me make an experiment with you. So this is the real lab. You can see the remote lab, sorry, you can see here that I have mounted a simple circuit. If you look into this, you will see wires and a resistor and a div there. So there are images of real components. But to give you a conceptual overview, I will go to the virtual lab and I will actually share this with you. So I will export this experiment. I will put this on the chat window. So everybody can follow the experiment with me. Okay, if you go to the chat window and if you click on that, you should have this experiment, okay? Vlad, are you following? Do you see the my experiment? Do you have it on your computer? Yes, I'm looking at it. Good, so now I can do experiments with everybody, okay? I can ask questions. For instance, you can see here, if I put my mouse on top of the function generator, you see that the waveform will turn into blue. So that's the waveform that we are seeing now. And if we put on top of my resistor, you will see that this is the waveform present of my resistor that is controlled by actually this diode here that I'm not seeing. So here I can stop the time. This is really nice with virtual labs. You can do this in a simulation. In reality, you cannot stop time. So there's a difference between a simulation and a real experiment. And the trick is that the teacher knows these differences and can take the potentiality or the advantage of one lab environment and explain something to the student or if he wants to detail something about the real response of a diode, it can go to the remote labs. So the whole idea is the professor is the main center of this because it will interact with the students according to the doubts that the student has according to the lecture you want to give, et cetera, et cetera. Okay? And I'm doing everything here using just my computer, a simulation or I can go to the remote lab. I can go for instance here and let me instead of putting a sine wave, let me put a triangular wave. Let me go to the oscilloscope. You can see here the response with the sine wave. And when I do perform experiment, I'll see the change here. You can see the detail that the waveform on the resistor is the couple from the one because there's a voltage drop on the diodes. We can explain this why, et cetera, et cetera and we can go to our remote, to our virtual lab and instead of a waveform like this, let me put a triangle, apply, okay? And we can see the difference here, okay? And if we do stop and we use the cursor, we'll see actually that there is a small difference here. When it is zero on the one, it has not initiated the voltage on the resistor. And the only idea is that students can actually follow my experiments or they can try on their own. For instance, right now, you or Vlad can be using the virtual experiment and be trying other things. And they can pass this to me and I can see what they are doing because you can actually generate an instant URL, an instant address that will give me the status of is experiment. And that's it. So basically what I wanted to share with you is that this whole idea of doing experiments has been improved because you can have hands-on, remote labs and virtual labs. And the main part here is training the teacher to be able to actually use all these resources to help the student learn more and do more experiments. So I'll go back to my presentation and thank you for your attention. Thank you so much, Gustavo. This was very interesting and interactive. I enjoyed very much this virtual lab which you offered. It reminded me of my ears in the faculty of electronics and telecommunication. It is something I have seen at some point there. So I didn't see any questions in the Q&A section. I encourage our participants to put their questions there. I'm sure that all the information and the links and the material will be very useful for our participants. The presentations will be uploaded on Eden's platforms. So Gustavo, thank you. We will come back to you in the end for the Q&A section. Thank you, Vlad. And thank you, everybody. Now we move to another one of my collaborators in projects. This time I'm happy to introduce Dain Agudonian, associate professor at Kaunas University of Technology, Faculty of Informatics from Lithuania. She leads a group of researchers called Smart Educational Technologies and Applications. She's involved in many projects, wrote a lot of publications related on the topics of digital technologies in education, micro-credentials and also AI. And she's also involved with the European Consortium of Innovative Universities. I am very looking forward to hearing about AI in education from Dain Agudonian. So, Dain Agudonian, please, the floor is yours. Good afternoon and thank you, Vlad, for introduction. It's my pleasure to share with all of you with experience here at Kaunas University of Technology. I hope you see my screen well and I will start my presentation on artificial intelligence in education. We developed together with Professor Thomas Laszowskas and as Vlad presented, I am a teacher at Informatics Faculty and my research area is Smart Educational Technologies and Applications. So here I will present more what allows artificial intelligence about personalized learning by using smart content on your phone whenever you need it the most due to the adaptive learning technology and about artificial intelligence, allowing and supporting or assisting online when teachers are working with large groups of students or during remote or hybrid learning what was the big request during the pandemic. So my presentation is on technologies and opportunities of artificial intelligence in education and artificial intelligence for learning, learning assessment and practical examples of artificial intelligence-based support in the teaching processes and as defined by Carter, artificial intelligence education applications, systems that analyze large amounts of data beyond simple algorithms. These applications are trained to identify and classify patterns, make predictions and suggestions based on probability and operate without supervision. And my presentation is more related to chatbots in education that allows the support or assistance online when teachers have to ensure quality of learning processes when working with a large number of students at once. So of course there are many opportunities for educational environment participants related to artificial intelligence. However, main opportunities are related to education management and delivery and programming teaching and teachers, learning and learning assessment, development of value sense skills for life and work in artificial intelligence era, offering life-long learning opportunities for all and artificial intelligence for learning analytics what is also very important in higher education organizations. In addition to the ability of artificial intelligence systems in education there are many advantages for students. What you see in this slide and there is also increased use of artificial intelligence systems usage in education as it helps students become more efficient learners due to the comprehensive understanding abilities which allows them to assess new knowledge quickly. So artificial intelligence is changing the landscape of education related to personalized learning, as I already mentioned. This change can be seen through personalized learning which uses information from student data to create and utilize lessons and activities for students based on their needs and interests. And advantages for students with special needs since artificial intelligence can be used to help special needs students because it has the ability to adapt. And the certificate of artificial intelligence has many opportunities in the field of education once in which is immersive learning this allows students to take more control over the learning. Furthermore, through national learning, although it's based on big data sets generated from students interactions online educational institutions on the site into each individual learner's needs allowing teachers assistance in learning lessons plan specific to what different types of learners. So what is very important when we speak about personalized learning? Intelligent tutoring systems are directly related to many advantages of artificial intelligence in education and systems can give students feedback on their work, guide them towards the right answer and can be proven to be more effective and traditional teaching methods alone. The most well-known benefit is its ability to provide helpful feedback on student academic performance that I was mentioned about the channels such as tests and homework assignments. We have a kind of safe guidance from an intelligent age and artificial intelligence also allows adaptive group formation where students can be grouped together based on their learning styles or skills so that they can learn better and more efficiently than ever before. Artificial intelligence can be used to help students learn more effectively thus based by assigning each student a unique learning plan based on their progress and ability which means that it is possible. And for example, facilitation by example in new studies suggests that artificial intelligence will help teachers by getting students personalized lessons. So artificial intelligence in education has revolutionized this by offering virtual reality lessons which is becoming more popular in education especially we saw this and found during the pandemic period especially in engineering studies there was a big request of virtual labs and virtual learning objects that allows users to learn by feeling immersed in different environmental scenarios. The advantages of artificial intelligence in education are the accuracy and speed with which essay graders can grade papers. As well as artificial intelligence it has the ability to assess a student's problem solving skills and offer personalized feedback based on their current state and provides an innovative way to make education courses at all levels more engaging and has the ability to integrate with more than education by creating dynamic scheduling and predictive analysis or tracking students' programs. So virtual humans is another point important as well can be used to help students learn subject material more efficiently and return information better. One of the most popular areas for artificial intelligence in education is intelligent game-based learning environments. So we are working on that and we are trying to get popular learners the best environments for education. And machine translation is one of issues as well. It's an advantage of artificial intelligence in education. This technology allows the invention to translate text into other languages and, of course, helping students learn different cultures and traditions worldwide. And artificial intelligence can help the differently able to learn and understand concept in a more accessible way. This would be useful when teaching students who have trouble understanding the material presented at traditional speeds. I mean the students with special needs. So as mentioned before, I would like to stop a little bit on the chatbots for education. And now I will talk about that as artificial intelligence-based technology that stimulates human-like conversations with users via text messages on chat according to that learning content. So there are many existing chatbots and frameworks identified in different usage papers and we can select the most suitable solution for that. Best support is a defined functionality. However, teachers can apply it in the way that they prefer most of all. So I will try to show you a little bit of the video, which one is developed in one of our courses. Together with Professor Blasowskas, who is presenting the example of one of our learning object developed in virtual reality space. So chatbots are becoming an ambitious trend in many fields. Chatbots with their computer programs used to conduct auditory or textual conversations. You see now the same samples. Could be effectively used, especially in large-scale learning scenarios with more than 100 students in lecture. Chatbots are able to solve the problem of individual students' support, what was missing very much during the pandemic. We had a very nice project here in Australia during the pandemic, the VC-based project, to analyze the situation of different technological impacts during the pandemic. So we found that especially for engineering subjects, it's very important to have virtual reality learning projects. Yes, the chatbots can be effective if we implement pedagogical agents and traditional intelligent tutoring systems in learning scenarios. So you see here an example of how pedagogical agents are human-like interfaces between some learner and the content in an educational environment and traditional intelligent tutoring system that aim to provide immediate and customized instruction of feedback to the learner. You see how Chatbot is working here. Chatbots interact with students in a synchronous way, making it possible to react on individual issues in virtual reality learning project. So the next example is as well related with Chatbots, the Chatbots are learning projects video learning project and you can see. Also, I will show this out voice. However, Chatbots and education promise to have a significant positive impact on learning success and students' satisfaction. And you see in the example, a Chatbot as a teacher that can decrease the cognitive load of the student, which is very important because they do not need to track large amount of content. The concept Chatbots as a teacher enables easily to teach, to turn back or forward, to interact with the process of learning or to have a pungent use of learning. In this case, you see the communication is also in voice about giving added value and contribution to the effectiveness of learning processes. So I will stop as an example and if you will find my slides, you will see these full scenarios of the implementation. And for conclusion, we can say that artificial intelligence allows making personalized learning plans for individual students and provide assistance to teachers or teachers in the teaching process. However, higher education organizations must balance artificial intelligence effectively with GDPR issues and security as well, what is now very important in all higher education organizations. And that is my short presentation. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Diana. I really love the examples with the VR and the Chatbots. I will send it also to my students because I also have some students doing, under my coordination, doing research about Chatbots. So it should be useful for them. We don't have yet questions in the Q&A. Please feel free to ask them. I saw that in the meantime, Gustavo got questions in the chat and he already answered them. A short discussion was started there. Maybe you can also ask your questions for Diana. If not, we will come back to you, Diana, in the end. If you will still be here and understood, you also have a meeting afterwards. So thank you. I will move now to the next speaker, the last speaker of today. And it's my great pleasure to introduce my colleague from the Eden Maps Steering Committee, Igor Balapan. He is coming from Croatia. He is the Vice Dean for Science, International Cooperation and Projects, and also the Head of Laboratory for Advanced Technologies in eLearning at FOI in Zagreb. Also author of many papers involved in many projects and I am certain his presentation is going to be also very interesting. So please, Igor, we are looking forward to hearing what you have to share today. Thank you, Vlad. I hope everyone can hear me and hopefully see my presentation. Vlad, can you just confirm? Yes, yes, everything is fine. Good, perfect. Thank you very much for this nice introduction. Although I'm the last one, I hope it will be interesting for you as those presenters before me, I'm actually going to present a bit of a different perspective. I'm going to actually highlight how did we as the institution prepare for emergency online teaching and learning and what effort did we take in order to raise the quality of teaching and learning at our institution? Although we have had a extensive experience in eLearning, we have been dealing with it. I think that I can say that we are one of the leading institutions in eLearning in Croatia and we have been extensively researching and dealing with the online learning for the past 25 years. Maybe that was also one of our advantages. So we are into the field and we knew actually what are the obstacles of that immediate transition. You saw from the previous presentation, I think Gustavo has also mentioned that COVID has boosted the transition, which is really the truth. And at first the students embraced the fact that they can work it from home as well as the teachers because they felt like comfortable just at the first glance. But later on the problems arise and the problems that I think that most of the higher education institutions need to dealt with. So here I'm trying to show you, I'm trying to show you what we did in order to overcome some of the issues we faced and try to anticipate the problems and to help our teachers and students to have this transition as smooth as possible. First, what we did, we started from the organizational perspective. We developed three basic models during which we actually in detail described the in-class, hybrid and fully online possibilities, case studies as indicated here. Actually, we anticipate the three different models for our teaching practice. So we just change or switch the models as the situation required. In order to provide the technical support, we have had installed Moodle LMS for the past 20 years, but besides purchasing the Zoom licenses, we also did our own big blue button which is a free and open source webinar system. We installed that one and we scaled our technical support, mean servers and everything needed. So we have our own installation to manage smaller groups of students and Zoom licenses were used for a really large number of students in class. We also installed the AVER conference which is a professional conferencing system with the high resolution cameras and microphones and speakers. We installed those in a variety of our teaching rooms, lecture rooms. So the teachers were able to either provide hybrid synchronous classes, meaning one group listening at the lecture room, the other group listening at home. That system enabled that or the teachers could just enter the empty lecture room and give their classes using that conferencing system. Next, we provided a series of support for teachers and students. I will get into the details a bit later, but for teachers, we provided a series of motivational tips and tricks on how to perform better in online environment. We also pre-scribed how should they organize their lectures to be as most stimulating for students as possible. So we actually pre-scribed how one teaching hour or 45 minutes should look alike if they're using only webinars or if they're using short videos plus other printed materials or other online materials or whatever, or how to organize their class if they're using voice over PowerPoint, other materials and short test and quizzes. So we actually provided a template with the detailed instructions because we wanted to have a unique structure of course of all our courses in the university. The templates were also provided in the Moodle Learning Management System and we also provided a base case examples. We also did create manual and detailed instructions on possible ways of conducting online exams. That was extremely important for teachers. And we also put our efforts into development and boosting the skills of the teachers. Those who are at the, I would say initial stage of working with a variety of different learning modalities such as blended learning and fully online learning as for those who were advanced. We also provided student support. Again, we provided them with the tips and tricks how to let's say behave in the online environment, how to stay motivated, focused and central. We provided a help desk for students that was an online help desk available for them every day. Help desk was actually provided by the support of their own peers and some of the teachers. So the students could ask for help either using online chat, webinar room or they could even get here into the building and ask for help. And we also provided equipment rent for them. So for those who were not able to get their own equipment in time, we provided equipment for them. And we also developed a quality control mechanism which is actually a series of survey that help us to assess the quality of courses delivered in online teaching, in emergency online teaching and then to do the series of educations and activities that would help teachers to raise the quality of their courses based on the feedback received. Now, in order to boost the teacher skills we provided a series of lectures and workshops. I just wanted to pinpoint the topics we have been focusing on during the support for teachers. So we gave lectures about emergency online teaching, flipped classroom, a variety of assessment modes, plagiarism and other issues that they could face with during online teaching and learning. And then we provided the hands-on workshops, ABC learning design that was also shown before. We showed them how to do the courses by using program learning paths for their students, how to implement online exam. As said, we have had a lot of people dealing with e-learning before so they were able to showcase good examples in a variety of that fields. In the second round of workshops, we showed them how to use the learning design paradigm to design the courses and how to reflect on the learning outcomes, how to design problem and project-based learning course, how to practically implement the flipped classroom, how to do with the work-based learning and the laboratory-based learning. So those are just some of the topics that most of them are also required by our teachers because they approach us and say, okay, we need this and that. But some other topics were also raised up by the other projects we are involved in and that are dealing with the emerging issues in e-learning and emerging topics in e-learning. In order to provide a transparent support for all stakeholders, we developed the online portal. The online portal was accessible to all of our target audience. So we have the part for teachers, for students and the part in which we present to all community how we are doing. I will just show you very briefly those three segments. For teachers, what we did on the right hand side, you see a set of useful link for teachers. So we provide a detailed guidelines on how to conduct online classes, how to use noodle system again. Some examples of conducting online colloquium or exams, instructions on how to record their materials in a quality manner. You know, it was not a problem to record the 60 minutes material or one hour and a half material. But the point is how to record material that those students watch afterwards. Then how to use big button, how to use Zoom tips and tricks on the left hand side. You see some tips and tricks we did for them. Unfortunately, those are in creation language, but you see those are a series of cards with a very short written text, but stimulating text. Here it says, what does it mean online present versus online absent? What does it mean for them to be organized versus non-organized? How to be attractive online? How to be clear online? Why is it important to be clear online, you know? So those are some of the tips we gave them on how to perform better conducting online courses. Also we provided some example of good practice. So we showed them some good courses that are already organized in a very good manner, according to the template we have provided in the learning management system. Of course we have provided them technical help that was needed for them as well to create the courses online, but for those teachers who required help. Then we did something similar for students. On the left hand side, you see tips and tricks. How to maintain discipline, although all the teaching has been moved to online platform. What does it mean to be on time in online environment? Why is it not good to get into the room like five minutes after the teacher? What does it mean for teacher? So what does it mean to be active learner? Why it's not good always to be just a passive learner? So those are the tips and tricks for students also to learn something about the good online behavior, acceptable online behavior. On the right hand side, you see a series of links provided to students. Sorry, a quick guide to our faculty because you need to understand some generations have never seen the building because we have online exams, sorry, online enrollments in the faculty and then the corona started, COVID started and some like 10% of our total population of students have never been into the building and have never met the professors. So we needed to use some kind of a portal to show them how to manage at our faculty. How is the teaching at our institution organized? Instructions for organized and conducting classes for students, how will they attend classes? How will they conduct distance exams? What is required? How to test their equipment? And netiquette, tips and tricks, big blue button instructions for them. So a complete set of instruction and support needed for students in order to be able to keep track on online teaching was very, very important, especially for the first year of the undergraduate study because that was their first encounter with the such kind of learning. And then the last phase is how we are progressing. As I already mentioned, we created a survey that reflected the quality of the delivered course. So we show the students the results, we show the questionnaire and for the subject and for a complete study program, you can see we show transparent but aggregated results for two previous study years. Of course, the results are in creation language, but we focus on the course organization. The students could answer on the liquid type five point scale from one to five on the right hand side. You see, I totally agree with the statement and on the left hand side, I disagree with the statement. So this is about course organization, whether the course is organizing in a good manner, whether the teachers have clearly established the rules on the course and central. Then we focus on the quality of the course materials, whether they are organized in a good manner, whether they are quality and clear, whether there is a variety of formats such as webinar video materials, central. Then we focus on the assessment, how the work the assessment made, whether the number of assessments was okay or not, whether the time was good for them and central. And then the general impressions, whether they were interested for the subject or not, how are they satisfied with the online performance of the subject and central. So those results are transparent and available to student community, aggregated. But we have those results per course and we continually monitor those courses every year. And then we speak with the teachers and provide needed activities, conduct need activities in order for those teachers to raise the quality of the courses. What are our future steps? Assure we use the results to improve our courses. We will pilot our vocational study program courses in blended mode. Here is the research framework that we have prepared for that. We have already applied to Creation Science Foundation to have this as a research project. We also submitted Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership project that will help us to improve the quality of teaching and learning. We have had luck. So we actually got two projects that we are coordinating. One is Teach for Edu4 and the other one is Rapide Project. Teach for Edu4 project is actually a strategic project where we develop learning designs of our courses and then we create a joint creative classrooms which are the courses conducted with our strategic partners. So two or three strategic partner institutions create one course that is conducted online and then the students from different institutions can enroll the courses and attend the courses. We pilot those courses as I would say short but intensive ones let's say in one big time and those work like two or three credits. And within Rapide Project we are developing work-based learning approach, work-based learning approaches, problem-based learning approaches and a variety of assessments that are appropriate for this time of online learning. And the final aim is also to integrate a variety of services into one dashboard called MyFoY where the teachers could see their workload, the satisfactual students with their classes, results from students' assessment and central and central and to develop the data analytics engine that will be only for management that will give the management inputs and the recommendations on how to move for based on the results of the service. And the last thing I would like to you this opportunity to all I'm aware that the Eden has the annual conference in June. We are also organizing our own conference again with the support of Eden. It's in the broadening in September. We also in cooperation with Eden have the track on education and learning analytics. The proceedings are indexed in the following bibliographic databases such as Apple Science, Instac, and Centra. And I think that this year we are putting a lot of effort. I saw the Yosef Duvart here in the list of the attendees as well. We are putting a lot of effort in having Eden Research Workshop also host in the broadening just today before the conference event. So we will also provide the opportunity for Eden Research Workshop participants to join the conference, to publish papers there at the much lower rates than the regular participants. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Igor, for this presentation of a good practice of how you do things in your faculty in the part of the University of Zagreb. And I think this was a good sum up of the session. We had very interesting presentations today for different, about different topics. You have a direct question in the Q&A and I would ask it to you. And then we can move to have a very short and quick discussion for the last minutes with all the remaining speakers. So the question, how did you provide the supervision on online exams enabling students to cheat? Our teachers have had different mechanisms for that but we required all participants to have their webcams on and their microphones. Not depending on the course because really we have a variety of courses and variety of different ways of providing online exams. For example, some students needs to provide a program, a computer program as the solution while some need just to answer questions. So there was really a variety of answers. And yeah, sure, I will stop screen share just a minute. Okay, good, thank you. And some even required participants to have other camera looking at their back or from their back or from the opposite perspective so they can see what the students were doing. What was really important for me is that we did a study with our own course in which we have like 300 students. And last year we did the online exam so fully online. But this year we did it in class and there were no difference in results. Yes, that's interesting. Please send also that research, that study so that we can see it. Because yeah, it's an interesting result. So the students while writing online exams students need to be logged in the learning management system. We have had the save browser environment but we respected one question per page and some other things just to ensure that the it's very hard to do the copy of the test. And plus that as I said, the students needed to be logged in and using web cameras via zoom or big blue button or other conferencing system in order to support the. Great, thank you Igor. Now if I can get help to get all the speakers highlighted together so that we can jointly have a small discussion. So we have a second question related to this and it was actually strongly connected to what I wanted to ask you. Igor already answered at least partially this for the first question. So we have a question from Professor Kailianu. The issue of online evaluation is very important. What online assessment systems do you use to ensure the most efficient and accurate assessment possible? Diana, would you start for this one please? Hello, yes. Online evaluation is dependent on, I was just thinking what are you thinking? It's the online evaluation of the pedagogy and the teaching and the student experiences or is the assessment? I mean, because it's not very clear for me at what you are referring. I think you are referring at assessment which is exams and seminars and things like that. And for that, for example, what Igor described as the method for an online exam where you have a camera looking at the students and another camera looking at the student environment where he is was initially used in our university by some professors. And then we somehow completely discouraged that. And I will explain why, for example. First is obviously GDPR. It's not fair because that's everybody you can see. You're knowing Zoom that if you want to really Zoom or MS Teams or a big block button, they all, WebEx, they all act the same. If you really want to be able to see everybody at the same time, then everybody sees everybody in gallery mode. You cannot have only one speaker for the rest and the rest for you. So that means that also- You can have this big blue button. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you can have this ability in big blue button. You can isolate webcams and then they do not see each other. Okay, yeah. So for example, we are using only Zoom and Microsoft Teams in our university and you can't there because big blue button was using a lot of our power resources to be able to run it. And we usually have these sort of exams where you really need to check this with very large cohorts. I mean, over 250 students at once. Usually for the smaller cohorts, it's not a problem because they have projects. So it's project-based exams more or less and they present and they are scheduled on presentations and it's more an oral exam multiple choice exam of some cylinder. So for me, that's the biggest question. If others and also yourself are able to see the environment of the student, I don't consider it that correct and that fair. And we had this big discussion with the students union and we completely discouraged it. And I don't recall happening it in this academic year. It was the case very early in June, 2020 when we were trying to see exactly what's the safest way. A lot of the professors move to project-based exams and to open book exam. It's a big challenge as a professor not to rely on multiple choice, but to give oral presentations and by the students obviously and to have problems which will allow them also to search online or to discuss and to give it, give an answer. Others were focusing on time constraints. So if you have a shorter and more limited time for the student to answer either two specific questions if it is a multiple choice exams or to even text or essay questions instead of one hour you only give 25 minutes or 30 minutes then the student doesn't really have that time to look around and to find solutions. He really needs to be able to type it directly. If he wants to pass. So that was the solution which we got. For us we run almost everything. I mean more than 90% of the exams were based on Moodle, different methods. Moodle has a lot of extra modules and a lot of customization which you can do for even the students, peer exams and evaluation. So we use also that by multiple choice in different possibilities. We use a lot of H5P for example, for evaluation as different tools. So depends. We are a large university. I don't have the data at this moment to know exactly what was used for all the exams but that's everything was more or less in the closed environment of our university which is a Moodle based. Plus a lot of plugins and customization. Thank you, Diana. I already knew what we do in our university but it was, I think it was useful for the rest of the participants to hear it. Gustavo, can you share about online assessment on an evaluation? How do you do it? During the pandemic times. So many teachers resorted to Moodle. Having the exam in Moodle, they tried to customize questions according for instance, the number of the student. Okay, for instance, the registration number is equal. You make a question that involves the registration number so that you can customize the questions and everybody had to access Moodle through Zoom. So everybody had to have their camera on and their microphone on, okay? And the whole idea is that we squeeze time is giving not so much time for students to answer the question. And this was a part of the emergency response. So I'm not sure if this was adopted by everybody but it was adopted in my school. Thank you. Thank you, Gustavo. I saw a lot of similarities with our university. We also do Moodle with Zoom and we try to customize questions as much as possible. Igor, since you already answered this topic, do you want anything to add about this? Or... No, okay. I saw that you also added some more information in the chat about the big blue button and... Yeah. If I can point it out to Igor that he needs to retie that to everyone because it's only to ask host and panelists. Ah, good die. Good die, I didn't... Sorry, thank you very much. Good. Okay. Academic problems, you know, I see mistakes. Thank you, thank you. To conclude our session, I have a last question for you because we are already a little bit late. So my final question for each of you is thinking about the future of the technical education in this digital new environment after the pandemic times, what would you say is the main thing a technical university should focus on? So the one thing which the technical university should focus most on now after we will exit the, hopefully, the pandemic times and hopefully also in a peaceful environment without the war at our borders. Whoever wants to... Let's start with Igor maybe because he didn't answer the last one. Igor, please. Maybe just short. Now we saw that the lectures could be done in a much shorter and much more flexible manner for students. And since we as technical universities tend to give as much more exercise and practical work to students, I think that we could somehow try to compress the time the students spend physically sitting and listening to the lectures by replacing many of the lectures with the much better online versions and then leave the students much more space for doing their own productive work. Thank you, Igor. I love that idea of creativity and leaving the students to have more freedom. Thank you. Gustavo, what would you say? Well, what do you want to do is a kind of roadmap. What can we do next? I would divide that in three parts. A technical, a pathological one and an educational or institutional one. In technical terms, you have to equip universities, okay? You have to equip institutions with the means to provide these services and the ICT, et cetera, et cetera. So you need investment, okay? In pathological terms, you need to adapt your courses and that means you need to do teacher training, capacity, et cetera. So you need to have people engaged in changing the way they lecture, et cetera. And finally, in educational or institutional terms, you have to realize things like this, like assessment, security, cybersecurity, because if you realize so much on digital tools then if you have an attacker in your university server that can disrupt the whole educational service. So you need to combine all these different stakeholders and shape for the future, okay? Thank you so much, Gustavo. I love especially the conclusion, shape for the future. It's, these are very nice words, close to home, close to heart. Diana? Yes, I was also thinking that you need to have different perspectives. You need to look at macro levels, so which also involve the entire education system, especially that where it's, even if you have a lot of autonomy in the higher education, you still are a state university. You are still evaluated and accredited. And I will start from there because basically one of the biggest challenges which I see at this moment, especially with all of the changes of the digital education is in the accreditation and evaluation, especially for engineers, you know? Because the evaluation and the accreditation are close to what it is done at this moment in Romania by Aracis, which is the national agency for evaluation and accreditation is allow me to say old fashioned. They really don't look and they don't take into account digital education, methods or methodology, not even project-based learning that much. And they try still to be in the 20th century at least if not even before that. So if you don't change the evaluation and the accreditation system, systemic change is happening slow. In fact, what you will do is like what we've done also in these two years, but also before is that at micro, I will say micro level and meso level. So at the level of the professors and at the level of the faculties, you will have changes. They will adapt and they will do the things but not at macro level. And that means that you are still relying only on the early adapters on those people which really want to do it because change can happen only if you make the full evaluation system for everybody the same and that needs to take into account the digital, the digitalness at least of the tools. That's one. And second, I will strongly see that you need or at least ask in technical higher education, we need to focus a bit more on how to to involve the external stakeholders, community and also industry and so on. And examples like virtual labs and artificial intelligence or different mentorship and a lot of things support and so on needs to be fully embedded in the university in the education. And this will mean that the three actors which is professors, students and the employers really need to be able not to just shape the curricula but also in the delivery of everyday activities. And then the engineers of tomorrow will really be much more closer to what they really need to do in the job market. And so the retraining of them it's going to be much more shorter and possible. And obviously the top work nowadays is micro-certificate how you enable very short training and specific courses also in traditional higher education not only for after the graduation system. Thank you. Thank you, Diana. Also very good points. I would record and transcribe all the things that three of you have said and sent it as a document with recommendations to all of our technical universities. Maybe at some point they will take them into account and also to the national agencies, bureaucracy is not helping so much our jobs. So let's finish with the hope. Let's finish with joy in mind and peace in mind. We are building a better community all together through these types of events, through all the work we are doing. And I am very proud to be a colleague of yours in this webinar. I am very happy you accepted to participate. I thank all of our participants for being here. I remind you that we still have two more days tomorrow and Friday of Eden Open Education week webinars. You can find all the information on the website. Also, don't forget that you will receive an email at the end with a digital badge and also the information from where you can get the presentations from all these sessions. In the end, don't forget to check out Eden annual annual conference in Estonia in Tallinn in June. Register to meet your work there and let's hope we can meet face to face. Stay safe everyone and have a nice day. Goodbye.