Dear TF-EDU members,

 

Next Monday, 13 June 2022 our annual conference begins at TNC22 in Trieste, Italy. I wanted to share with you some highlights that are education related from the conference programme. The event can be also accessed online:

https://tnc22.geant.org/

 

Tuesday, 14 June 2022:

 

16:00 – 17:30 CEST

Session: The Inevitable Covid session

 

ERTL - A COVID-19 intervention for 46 Colleges of Education in Ghana

The COVID19 pandemic disrupted every system globally. Education delivery in emerging economies was hardest hit due to underdeveloped support systems and infrastructural deficits. The Government of Ghana innovated several interventions to implement emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL). The presentation focuses on specific interventions rolled out by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission in Colleges of Education. This intervention relied on the provision of new and improvement of existing Wi-Fi Connectivity in the colleges. This was also augmented with the distribution of smart mobile handsets. The intervention was aimed at leaving no student behind and dubbed “Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning”.

Speakers: Anthony Dzidzornu (Ghana Tertiary Education Commission), Jacob Akunor (Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC))

 

Wednesday, 15 June 2022:

12:45 - 13:15 CEST

Demonstration:

National platform for virtual education and analytics in Ecuador – ELSA

ELSA aims to provide a high-performance e-learning platform guided by a methodology based on active learning and assisted by learning analytics processes, which allows improving the virtual educational process of higher education institutions in Ecuador. The platform runs on CEDIA’s distributed computing infrastructure, which is based on hyper-convergence technology and has immediate response systems for failures and contingency sites. The platform has specialized data analysis components that collect data on technological, pedagogical, and communicative skills, which allows assertive decision-making at different levels. ELSA support approximately 700 thousand students enrolled during the pandemic period and is one of the main pillars in the digital transformation process of Ecuadorian universities.

Presenter: Freddy Sumba (CEDIA)

 

16:00 – 17:30 CEST

Session: Fixing the World

 

Setting course towards digital sovereignty. How ‘public values’ can steer us towards a better world

Digital technologies are not neutral, they have the power to significantly change the way research and education institutes work. The only way in which we can meaningfully gain control over digital sovereignty is by standing strong together. NRENs can have an important role doing things differently. In this session we will sketch the urgency of the matter and present SURF’s ‘public values’ approach towards digital and academic sovereignty within the Netherlands. Let’s set course towards a better (digital) world!

Speakers: Christien Bok (SURF), Corno Vromans (SURF)

 

16:00 – 17:30 CEST

Session: Trusted Infrastructure in Action

 

GEANT last resort solution to enables NRENs to support the digital transformation of Erasmus+

This talk reports on the work GÉANT and the NRENs undertook to scale out the MyAcademicID Service, one of the most used service in eduGAIN, the challenges faced in rolling-out a new attribute (ESI) to identify students at the European scale, the Erasmus+ IdP of last resort launched in just a few months to ensure that all students can take advantage of the digitized processes and the publication of the ESI Entity Category.
MyAcademicID Service enables students to use their federated accounts to authenticate themselves to the Erasmus+ services. MyAcademicID also enables students to use their national eIDs, through eIDAS, and link them with their academic accounts. In the first year of operation, ~100K students from ~2000 HEIs from 32 countries, used MyAcademicID.

Speakers: Licia Florio (GÉANT), Christos Kanellopoulos (GÉANT)

 

Thursday, 16 June 2022

11:00 – 12:30 CEST

Session: Supporting Research and Education

 

Are NRENs ready for digital education?

The NREN landscape highlights key trends for developing new, long term strategies for education: identifying key objectives for long term vision for the digitalization of education and how NRENs can play a role. Identifying and describing what underlying infrastructure, policies and steps are needed. One key area is flexibilization of education: institutions will need to adapt to create standardized programmes to recognize each other's course achievements across institutions and countries. Mobility of the data for achievements of students would require safe and secure access to their data while ensuring the ownership of data is with the individual and our NREN community provides the underlying infrastructure and expertise to support it.

 

Speaker: Gyongyi Horvath (GEANT)

 

Collaboration opportunities

 

Gyöngyi identified in her presentation that a key area is flexibilization of education and that institutions will need to adapt to create 

standardized programmes to recognize each other's course achievements across institutions and countries. Mobility of the data for achievements of students would require safe and secure access to their data while ensuring the ownership of data is with the individual and our NREN community provides the underlying infrastructure and expertise to support it. 

Corno will present the result of a pilotproject on student mobility that are part Dutch Acceleration Plan that will finish by the end of this year. The usecase for this project is a student who wants to attent a couse at another university. 

Next he will focus on the urge to think about digitisation from a Public Value perspective, give some examples of pilot projects and calls for collaboratioin on this theme.

 

Speaker Corno Vromans (SURF)