It’s a small world after all…

Sunday I’m off to Europe to attend Online Educa for the fifth time.

Nearly two thousand people (from 73 countries!) will join me there. A quarter of them (from more than 50 countries) will make presentations. The participants are academics, government officials, NGOs, and corporates. Educa is not only the largest truly international learning conference, it’s also the most diverse.

This year’s themes are:

Designing Effective Online Learning
o Creative pedagogical approaches, building effective learning frameworks and architectures.
o Flexibility in instructional design related to teaching and learning models that deliver positive results.
o Setting up and maintaining collaborative learning environments.
o Effective content design, development and delivery.
o Mainstreaming open source learning solutions.
o Digital content creation and ownership, re-use issues and Intellectual Property Rights, building online resources, portals and content repositories.
o Standards and standardisation linked to open and interoperable systems and services

Game-Based Learning and Simulations
o Digital game-based learning approaches aimed at meeting the needs of tomorrow’s learners, online gaming and collaboration activities.
o Examples of how caves, MMORPGs, avatars, and fun contribute to learning processes, and how simulations and games can help clarify and experience complex relationships and create arenas for experiments, enabling learning by experience.
o (Serious) business games and simulations, virtual laboratories and virtual online communities.
o Fully-fledged simulation of experiments and computations in the sciences, including mathematics.



Quality Standards
o Approaches to quality assurance in e-learning, quality frameworks and measurements of quality meeting the needs of the learning community.
o Integration of e-learning quality standards in industrial standardisation initiatives.
o Improving the quality of ODL in education, quality models that work, practical design and implementation of a quality methodology.
o Sectoral, regional, national and European collaborative initiatives aimed at enhancing the quality of e-learning.

Emerging Tools and Community-Based Services
o New forms of learning making use of the latest technological developments from virtual and augmented reality to community-based services such as wikis, blogs and blikis.
o Podcasting and the learning opportunities offered by this and other developments in the infotainment world. Semantic Web and Web2 concepts.
o Innovative experiences with enabling devices, systems and services based on mobile, wireless and wearable technologies, virtual environments and systems supporting ambient or contextual learning.
o Innovative applications of grid computing, as well as advances in telepresence, streaming, collaborative and conferencing technologies.
o Impact of interactive and digital TV (including mobile TV).

Sector Specific Approaches
o Medical e-learning and e-learning tutorials and resources for doctors, medical students, healthcare professionals and patients.
o E-Learning in support of Continuous Medical Education (CMS) and the health sector generally.
o E-Learning aimed at the pharmaceutical, banking and finance, automotive, architectural and engineering sectors, where specialised requirements and the need for sector know-how are paramount.
o E-Learning applications within the defence and military domains.

Lifelong and Informal Learning
o The role of communities of practice and subject-matter experts and peer mentoring in informal learning.
o Informal learning as part of on-the-job learning and participation in working life generally.
o Measuring, accrediting, and rewarding informal learning.
o Building digital skills in working life.
o ePortfolios and the portability and transferability of learning throughout life.
o The importance of e-competences for life and employment.
o Lifelong professional development and the links between universities and industry.
o Encouraging, promoting and developing lifelong learning and the role of digital technologies.
o Promoting ‘cradle to grave’ learning attitudes; building the skills for lifelong learning from school-age onwards.
o Fostering the ability to learn and strategies for improving learning opportunities; ways to manage and share what you know.

Performance Based Assessment
o Improving the relevance of assessments with innovative methods and technologies.
o Using embedded assessment in the workplace to empower the learner and better align the entire learning life cycle to organisational and business objectives.
o Using certification and assessment to measure returns on education beyond simple knowledge recall.

Promoting Inclusivity
o The use of information and communication technologies for capacity-building and their role in achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals and for building knowledge societies.
o Diversity training and e-learning as a means to support a policy of inclusion in the workplace.
o Promoting equitable access to learning through ICT; addressing gender and ability issues with effective e-learning strategies.
o Ensuring the suitability and usability of content and the online learning offer.
o Bridging the digital divide.

The Impact of ICT in Schools
o Successful programmes integrating ICT in schools
o Redesigning learning environments for the Net Generation distinguished by their self-directed and extensive experiences of technology.
o Curriculum development aimed at supporting digital creativity.
o Blended learning that meets the challenges of bringing online learning into school environments.
o In-service and pre-service teacher training; developing digital teachers who are as much at home with technology as their students.
o Finding the right tools and environment to enable real learning in schools.
o ICT-supported initiatives aimed at promoting student collaboration across borders and generations.
o The role of search engines in school education; security and safer Internet initiatives.

Higher Education and the Impact of ICT
o Transforming Higher Education through the use of ICT.
o Defining and bench-marking e-learning.
o Leadership and e-learning as components of the wider student experience.
o Flexibility and meeting the needs of students, wherever and whoever they may be.
o Change management and issues related to the deployment of e-learning: funding models, dealing with staff change and up-skilling.
o Integrating of e-learning within institution-wide strategic ICT supported initiatives like e-administration, e-research and digital libraries.
o The effect of Technology Enhanced Learning (TeL) on traditional educational research, including the changing role of journals, and the promotion of educational research that investigates ICT-supported innovation.
o Strengthening links between universities and industry. Collaboration, competition and co-opetition amongst universities worldwide.
o Effective VLEs.

ICT Supported Training in Companies
o The role of technology-enhanced learning in boosting workforce performance and productivity.
o Defining and designing e-learning linked to business performance strategies.
o The importance of ICT in executive coaching and development.
o Cost-effectiveness, ROI and out-sourcing.
o New ways of learning in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs).
o Enhancing customer relationships through e-learning.
o Real-life examples of on-demand, creative learning opportunities in the (mobile) workplace; collaborative and knowledge management tools.
o Implementing learning solutions in multinational companies and the impact of globalisation and internationalisation.
o Personalised learning and competence management.
o E-Learning in the Public Sector

Many of these are precisely the issues I’m working on. The value of engaging people with perspectives different from my own is more than worth the cost of admission.

A brief translation exercise.

ICT = Information and Computer Technology

SME = Small and medium-sized enterprises

NGO = non-profit

European informal learning generally encompasses lifelong learning; in the U.S., informal learning is mainly applied to the job environment.