They include social-media and co-learning guru Howard Rheingold; futurist Mark Stevenson, author of the bestselling "An Optimist’s Guide to the Future"; Lisa Lewin, Managing Director of US company Pearson’s Technology Products division, who is responsible for driving digital product innovation and using technology to shape the future of higher education; Professor Dr. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Oxford University’s Internet Institute, whose recent publications include "Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think’" and "Learning with Big Data"; Dr George Siemens, Executive Director of the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Laboratory at the University of Texas; and Stephen Downes, senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, editor of the OL Daily and, together with George Siemens, co-originator of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).

"ONLINE EDUCA really is unique," says Jaan Netzow, an IBM Smarter Work Expert who has been to all twenty conferences. "It is an extraordinary, transformative conference that has not only been a platform from which to observe the effect of technological change on education during a period of unparalleled transition but a forum within which some of the most significant developments in modern learning and international education cooperation have been discussed and planned."

The conference was the brainchild of the late Karl Badde, a multilingual German educational entrepreneur who founded an international chain of adult education centres in the Arab world before realising that developments in information and communications technology were about to change learning, training, and education forever.

"My father was a great believer in the transformative power of education," says his daughter Rebecca Stromeyer, who is the CEO of ICWE GmbH, the international events company that hosts EDUCA and has built it into Europe’s flagship conference on education and technology. "He knew that we were living in a period of unprecedented change. The fall of the Berlin Wall opened up new possibilities for cooperation between East and West, but at the same time, new developments in technology meant that education was about to undergo the biggest change in history.

"We decided that Berlin was the place to bring people together to discuss what it all meant. Over the years, tens of thousands of educators, trainers, business people, planners, advisers, policy makers, politicians, administrators, and academics from all over the world have come to Berlin for EDUCA. They realise that it is a special event in a special city which has become an important hub for new-media innovators and Internet entrepreneurs. ONLINE EDUCA gives everyone a chance to look through the window into the future."