5th Consortium Meeting in Hungary

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On the 15th of May the OEPass team met for the fifth consortium meeting in Budapest, hosted by
our partner BME.

In addition to the discussion about which further steps are to be taken within the outputs, the upcoming National Multiplier Events were the focus of this meeting. Each partner presented their plans and the time frame. A link to other conferences or lectures was considered advantageous in order to disseminate the project more widely.

Furthermore, the Learning Passport could be discussed in its final stages and, following a further review of the partners, is expected to be completed soon. While this intellectual output was technically completed, and other 3 were well under way, the last of the OEPass outputs, was just about to start. In this work package we will look at the future of open education, by considering a set of scenarios to identify important key driving forces (e. g. economic growth, legislative environment, technology diffusion) thought to be important to the future of credentialisation. Our aim is to explore and represent different sets of future challenges and opportunities for open education in Europe.

The evening before, we met with the partners from our sister project MicroHE. Beside enjoying delicious, local typical food, the opportunity was used to exchange information about the progress in both projects. After such long acquaintance with our MicroHE colleagues, of course some more social conversations were also on the menu.

We would like to thank again our host BME for the great organisation and all partners for this very productive consortium meeting. Have a safe trip home!

4th OEPass Consortium meeting in Germany

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On the afternoon of 6 February 2019, we concluded an intensive, and highly productive, 2.5-day joint OEPass–MicroHE meeting in Heilbronn, Germany. Our host, DHBW, showed great initiative by proposing an innovative agenda and the unconventional meeting structure proved to be very beneficial.

Just like last time, on the afternoon of our arrival we had an expert meeting to kick off the work. This time our guest was Darco Jansen from EADTU. Darco is the coordinator of the European Short Learning Programmes (e-SLP) project, another Erasmus+ funded project, the partners of which have already conducted surveys about short learning programmes. Their results have great relevance to both projects, particularly MicroHE, that is also foreseeing to undertake surveys and interviews to analyse the current and short-term scope of micro-credential provision and to identify barriers to their accreditation and recognition in Europe. After an exchange of introductions of project goals, plans and our findings so far, we agreed that – in order to maximise the value of our combined efforts and to avoid reinventing the wheel – the MicroHE survey will learn from and build upon the e-SLP findings and also feed back the lessons learned from our own surveys and interviews to e-SLP.

On the first official meeting day, instead of sitting through a series of presentations, we were given time and space to discuss and fine-tune our project outputs in practical workshops. We still have some “homework” to do before we can pronounce the tackled outputs finalised, but we made greater progress during these few hours than for weeks beforehand. Especially since we all had different angles of approaching the same results, the constructive group work could bring all the partners to the same comprehensive understanding of the (multiple) purposes and functionalities of the outputs we are working on.

Both partnerships were invited to each other’s meetings, and although not everybody could stay for all 3 days, Tuesday evening we had both OEPass and MicroHE representatives at DHBW’s premises to participate in the most entertaining part of the programme, the team building cooking activity. We had a truly international menu of 10+ dishes, including simple but amazingly delicious Lithuanian garlic bread, Indian curry, Finish casserole (with a Greek twist), Italian gnocchi made from scratch, German apple strudel and a heavenly Hungarian dessert.

3rd OEPass Consortium meeting in Malta

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Since the project started in November 2017 this was the third time the consortium met face to face, and this time it was KIC’s turn to host the partners in Malta.

After an expert workshop held on Monday afternoon with 0xcert CEO, Kristijan Sedlak, and the subsequent consultation with the MicroHE partnership, we gained a very exciting and useful insight into how blockchain technology could potentially support our our efforts in semi-automated credential verification and recognition in a secure decentralised online environment. If you would like to know more about the meta-data standards utilised to facilitate the working of the MicroHE Credentials Clearinghouse, we invite you to participate in the public consultation set up on Github.

By the end of the meeting we wrapped up the internal testing phase of the OEPass Learning Passport, and after having discussed the conclusions, and producing the second iteration of this promising tool, a small team prepared a session to test it with the 2018 EDEN Research Workshop participants on the 25th of October. We wish that this will be an important step towards making the recognition of open learning a reality across Europe. The workshop in Barcelona is only the start of the Learning Passport’s public testing phase, please let us know if you would like to participate.

2nd OEPass Consortium Meeting

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On 23-24 April 2018 we had our second joint MicroHE-OEPass consortium meeting in Budapest, Hungary.

On both days, important questions regarding open and future work packages, quality management and other organizational issues were discussed. By the time of the next joint meeting in Malta in October, the further procedure for the successful handling of the project could be determined.

The evening was comfortably concluded with original Hungarian cuisine.

Thanks to all partners for this productive meeting!

Cross posted from the MicroHE web site