Blockchain technology provides a decentralised peer-to-peer infrastructure, supporting openness, transparency, accountability, identity management and trust. As such, the Blockchain has the potential to revolutionise education in a number of ways. Blockchain technology offers opportunities to thoroughly rethink how we find educational content and training services online, how we register and pay for them, as well…
The first virtual Summer Summit of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) took place on August 26-27, 2020. The event was a great success, with over 300 participants joining from 25 countries. The event’s theme was exploring Learning Technology in a time of crisis, care and complexity. Participants explored the themes of crisis, care and…
On July 13th 2020, the work of the Open Blockchain group was presented to the W3C Credentials Community Group. John Domingue, Allan Third, Alexander Mikroyannidis, Niaz Chowdhury and Mano Ramachandran joined a conference call between all members of the W3C group and presented their latest work on Verifiable Credentials and Blockchains. In particular, John and Allan presented…
The first formal review of the QualiChain project took place on June 18th, 2020. The review was held online and was attended by representatives from all project partners, the Project Officer, two external reviewers, as well as DG CONNECT representatives. The review was a complete success, with the reviewers and the Project Officer commending the…
The OpenLearn course Discovering Computer Networks has been included in the UK Government Digital Skills Toolkit for furloughed workers. The Digital Skills Toolkit is a collection of training resources, including courses from Google, FutureLearn and the Open University, aiming to help people acquire digital skills for improving their employability. This online training initiative will be…
The 9th eSTEeM conference took place online on April 29-30, 2020. The conference is organised annually by the Open University, UK. Entitled "Informing Student Success – From Scholarship to Practice", this year’s programme has been a mix of short orals, workshops and poster presentations, showcasing scholarship work conducted by STEM colleagues. Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi…
Alexander Mikroyannidis has co-edited the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2020). The eLmL 2020 proceedings include the papers of the QualiChain Special Track on “Decentralised Qualifications on the Blockchain”. Project partners have contributed 6 papers that describe the context and goals of the QualiChain pilots, the key research questions…
In the UK, there are over 2 million people with sight loss, with 360,000 registered as blind or partially sighted. Approximately 25% of those with partial sight loss are employed, but this decreases to 10% for those who are blind. There is therefore a pressing need to enable blind and visually impaired people to gain…
The latest meeting of the Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network took place in KMi on December 5-6. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The OpenLang Network project is building a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants within an open and highly interactive online…
The Open Education Global Conference (OE Global 2019) took place in Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy on November 26-28. The OE Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students from more than 35 countries to discuss and explore how Open Education advances…
