OEPass at the EURASHE 2019 Annual Conference

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Employers have increasingly been demanding transferable skills of our students, the ability to work in a team, creative thinking and problem solving; they’ve also asked Higher Education Institutions to provide new skills to retrain their staff. UAS have been reasonably good at providing these; yet the pace of change is increasing: new jobs demanding new skills appear every month.

The EURASHE Annual Conference rests on the belief that we can hope to comprehend the framework for the future of education in our next 10 years at least by reflecting on the following questions: How can you anticipate what you don’t know? How can you expect the unexpected? Mostly: how can you steer your life, be it personal or professional, in times of uncertainty and yet find the relevant answers for you and society?

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!

DHBW ‘Fachtag’

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On February 7, the DHBW Heilbronn hosted the internal symposium under the motto “Digital Transformation”. More than 100 professors and lecturers from the different DHBW campuses could be welcomed at the location who want to network on topics from research and teaching.

Our project partner Florian Rampelt from the Stifterverband, among others, drew a wide arc between the past and the future about digitisation before the visitors set to work themselves in workshops.

Two workshops were held about our projects OEPass and MicroHE: The first workshop on our Learning Passport, which is currently being developed as part of the project, was followed with great interest by 12 participants. Jochen and Raimund from the DHBW and Florian from Stifterverband provided an overview about the OEPass project and gave participants the opportunity to ask questions about the documentation and recognition of micro-credentials via the Learning Passport.

The second workshop focused on micro-credentials within our project MicroHE. The central question of this workshop was to what extent it would be possible to establish small-scale educational qualifications within the structures of the DHBW within the next few years. 26 participants took part in this inspiring discussion.

We would like to thank all participants for their great interest in our projects.

Cross posted from the MicroHE website

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.

OEPass introduced to the MOONLITE community

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At the end of October 2018 OEPass and its sister project, MicroHE, were invited to be introduced at the first multiplier event of the MOONLITE project. The recognition that these projects have the potential to make welcome changes to the educational landscape, and make a positive impact on the lives of Europe’s migrants and refugees, was a sign that our dissemination efforts are bearing fruits even in niche circles of HE providers.

The extent and significance of the impact made by OEPass and MicroHE depend on too many factors to predict precisely, but as Higher Education Institutions won’t be able to swim against the technological current for very long, we can be hopeful that maybe this time they will seize the day and lead the way to establishing an open and shared credential infrastructure by opening up their own credential offerings and making efforts to validate and recognise that of others, regardless whether these credentials come from formal or non-formal education. If this will also result in better integration of disadvantaged people, such as migrants and refugees, into our European society, job market and economy, we should be doubly pleased.

The detailed programme and all the presentations – that were all recorded – are now available on the MOONLITE website. Click here to view the presentation on OEPass and MicroHE, or find the slides on Ildiko Mazar’s Slideshare.

13th European Quality Assurance Forum

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The 13th European Quality Assurance Forum focused on how institutions and quality assurance agencies can build systems that encompass a broad range of activities, including learning and teaching, research, governance and administration, and service to society.

As a tool for supporting the quality of higher education, quality assurance (QA) has, in many European higher education systems, focused largely on learning and teaching. However, as underlined in the introduction to the Standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the EHEA (ESG), Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) should have QA policies and processes that cover other institutional activities, and in parallel, external QA is increasingly looking into these policies.

While it is clear that degrees from accredited HEIs form the gold standard in terms of their recognition and portability, no clear set of comprehensive criteria exists to assess the quality of new forms of credentials, nor for standards and technologies which are applied to credentials. The authors of this paper therefore proposed a framework for such analysis in the form of a set of quality characteristics for credentials, based on work conducted by the OEPass project.

Guests from Singapore

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On the 25th of November a delegation from Singapore visited the Research and Laboratory Department of DHBW Heilbronn, Germany. Together with their president Prof. Graf, OEPass project coordinator Mr. Raimund Hudak, Head of Research, welcomed the employees of SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), an authority of the Ministry of Education in Singapore. The delegation was informed about, and discussed the objectives of, the ongoing EU sister projects MicroHE and OEPass.

The SSG promotes and coordinates lifelong learning with educational institutions in Singapore to ensure that students and working adults have lifelong access to quality education. As part of the SkillsFuture movement, the SSG has developed a competence framework for key sectors of the economy. This Competence Framework is developed by the government in collaboration with employers, industry associations, trade unions and professional associations for Singapore workers, and it provides up-to-date information on career paths, occupations, professional roles, existing and new skills and relevant training programmes.

The SkillsFuture Singapore team travelled through Germany and met, besides the DHBW Heilbronn, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the German Development Institute (DIE), the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BiBB) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Based on our mutual interest, we agreed to continue to regularly exchange information on our project developments and to work more closely together on the topic of FutureSkills.

OEPass at #EDLW2018

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First testing of the Learning Passport

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It is a pleasure to announce that the first phase of testing the Learning Passport was successfully completed by mid-October 2018.

The purpose of the OEPass Learning Passport is to systematically collect a set of precisely defined data and information about open education experiences which were identified as decisive factors for their recognition. The form’s content is closely related to the ESCO classification of European skills, competences, qualifications and occupations.

The draft template of the Learning Passport is intended to test with real education providers as to what extent their existing (micro-)qualifications can be transparently classified for subsequent recognition by third parties (i.e. by other Higher Education Institutions and/or prospective employers). For the purposes of this piloting exercise, a credential is defined as a certification of a qualification.

During the course of the internal testing, each project partner filled in the form by means of a real online course at his or her institution. The provided feedback is now evaluated in a feedback loop. The Learning Passport will be adjusted in the next steps and will be presented to the public soon.

 

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.