VELJA GOVORJENA BESEDA

OCWC Global 2014 Conference – Open Education for a Multicultural World

Ljubljana, 23. 4. 2014

Androulla VASSILIOU

Evropska komisarka za izobraževanje, kulturo, večjezičnost in mlade

Ladies and gentlemen,

It's a real pleasure to be here with you today. I would like to thank the organisers for their kind invitation.

I cannot think of an audience more committed to Opening up Education than you. The universities and other educational institutions here today show a strong desire to change society by giving everyone greater access to knowledge. This is not just a fashion or a trend - technology has the potential to fundamentally change the way we teach and learn in Europe, and in the world as a whole.

And the supply of online courses is growing, especially from Europe - this past year has seen the share of European Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) grow from about one out of five to almost one out of three now.

In the European Commission, we are acutely aware of the need to take full advantage of all that the digital era has to offer. We know that Europe's future depends on it.

Indeed, jobs and growth are at the core of Europe's policies, and education for employability is crucial to our economic prosperity. But if we are to tackle the skills mismatch and high unemployment that Europe is currently facing, we must improve our educational and training systems; we must achieve greater equity and more effective learning.

In the past few years, the European Commission has put forward a number of policy initiatives to bridge the gap between the skills people have and the skills the labour market needs.

In particular, last September I presented an initiative with Vice President Kroes on Opening up Education that addresses this dimension. We are urging governments to use more and better digital technologies in schools, to put the learner in the centre and to promote innovation in the way people teach and learn.

Our aim is to help Member States and education institutions to tackle issues such as the cost and effectiveness of education, the relevance of teaching practices; and the adequacy of educational governance and organisation. Through Erasmus+, the EU's new programme for education and training, the Commission will fund partnerships of organisations to explore new organisational models that allow open education in their daily practices.

Opening up Education is about a new culture, where sharing knowledge and learning experiences becomes an everyday practice and is incorporated in all educational systems.

It is about reaching out to those who are committed to education but do not feel comfortable with technology; to those who want to innovate but don’t feel their educational environment is an adequate one; to those who are afraid that innovation and change could bring disruption to educational systems.

The implications of opening up education are many and include: the development of personalised learning pathways; the reinforcement of lifelong learning; and creating more accessible learning environments where teachers and institutions are able to reach learners outside the school walls who they would otherwise have never reached.

One of the big challenges in opening up education is to provide teachers with the skills they need to fully embed technology into their daily practices. Wherever I go, I meet enthusiastic teachers eager to improve education but unsure about how to apply new modes of teaching and learning.

That is why a very firm focus in our Opening up Education initiative is on teacher training. If we want to build true openness in education, we have to start with teachers and how they are trained.

Many of your organisations are directly or indirectly involved in teachers' initial or continuous training, for example in the education departments of your universities. Ensuring that all teachers have the adequate skills to teach with ICT is a requirement for the success of Opening up Education.

Opening up Education is a call for action at all levels. We will only succeed if we all work together. Policy makers must create the right conditions. Educational institutions must become innovation hubs. The passion which teachers have for their subjects must be allowed to emerge in delivering open education. A mixture of top-down and bottom-up approaches, one that comprehensively engages all actors at all levels, will be a key to success.

As we look to the future of Opening up Education, we see a number of challenges that I am confident we can address with success, provided we work together.

There are three challenges in particular that I would like to highlight: the first is learning personalisation, learning analytics, and big data; the second is repackaging learning pathways; and the third is quality, assessment and transparency.

Let me begin with personalisation.

OER, courseware and MOOCs have done marvellous things by opening up access to knowledge and learning opportunities. But we may now go deeper into personalising learning.

Many are calling MOOCs “canned classes”. And in some cases they are right. If we don’t move beyond the traditional course models and use the potential to personalise learning, we will miss out on a major part of the potential that technology brings to education.

A deeper use of learning analytics will ensure that, within a specific course, the user’s performance is used not only to assess performance and grade, but also to adapt the learning experience to each specific learner's actual needs.

This one step alone represents a huge increase in the effectiveness of education.

Moving towards a use of learning analytics implies strong improvements in two very technical elements:

  • In learning semantics, which allow the thorough mapping of curricula into learning objects and the linking of different learning objects to specific resources;
  • And in a continuous evolution on the usage of big data, the large-scale information on how people learn, which of course needs to take account of privacy concerns.

As for the second challenge, which concerns repackaging learning pathways, many in the OER community refer to "unbundling" as one of the tendencies for the near future, especially in higher education. Learners, it is said, will seek different services from different universities.

Instead of pursuing a single linear course of study, they will collect different courses from different institutions, and, eventually, with the support and accreditation coming from a variety of institutions, will be able to construct their own learning pathway.

This is indeed the model being implemented with MOOCs today, as learners are picking one course here and another one there.

But this misses something. One of the main elements of the guidance provided traditionally in one single university is the design of a coherent programme, or package, of different courses.

Individuals need this. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why MOOCs are being followed mainly by individuals who already have a higher education degree and who therefore are better able to define the learning path they want to take.

So one of the challenges is for individual institutions, or groups of institutions, to design coherent packages or programmes, that use mutually recognised Courseware or MOOCs.

Though this may sound too daring to some individuals and institutions, we cannot avoid this discussion. And this brings me to the third challenge I wanted to address with you.

If we want to give learners this freedom to pick and choose courses from different learning institutions, one of our main challenges will be to ensure the quality of such programmes and their recognition of the learning achieved. And this means developing quality assurance mechanisms which will provide transparency regarding the quality of MOOCs, courseware and OER.

At EU level, we are currently working on the creation of a European Area of Skills and Qualifications. So in this context, it will be an opportunity to revisit such quality concerns.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The challenges ahead of us are not small. But the opportunities clearly outweigh such challenges.

Education is the best investment that society can make in its future. During my mandate as Commissioner I have had the opportunity, I would even say the privilege, to contribute to this ongoing process of Opening up Education, and I am proud of what we have achieved.

I know that you are here today because you share our vision. For this I am grateful. The European Commission will stay committed to this joint effort. Please also continue with the marvellous work that you have been doing over the past years.

Together, we will create this world, where Anyone can learn Anytime, Anywhere, with Any device and with the support of Anyone.

Thank you.