"Fostering Quality in Creative Learnscapes"
Brussels, November 2009 - Around eighty participants accepted EFQUEL's invitation and took part in the recent Innovation Forum 2009. The extremely high esteem for EFQUEL expressed by the participants was impressive, and a pleasant surprise for the core organizers. The Innovation Forum's main achievement, however, was surely the overall degree of satisfaction with the event that the participants and keynote speakers articulated.
In one of the closing speeches, Rolf Reinhardt emphasized that "EFQUEL recognizes every single participant in its individuality as valuable and important", and this was evident in the Forum's structure, which was created in a highly interactive conference-workshop mix. Ulf Ehlers was responsible for planning the workshops, which included novelties like speed dating and vision development. By the end of the EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2009, every participant had been in direct contact at least once with every single one of the other participants. The wide-open channels provided the chance to share opinions and to discuss state-of-the-art quality approaches in learning.
The main output of the conference, created jointly by the participants, was the "EFQUEL Innovation Agenda beyond 2010": a manifest that paves the way to the future of technology-enhanced learning and underlines the important role of EFQUEL in this process.
The four main "pillar statements" voted on by the participants and seen as EFQUEL's principal roles are:
- showing leadership and vision in the field of quality of e-learning, while fostering a culture of sharing and dialogue;
- promoting the use of open educational resources through the identification of suitable methods for the quality development of these tools;
- exploring the innovation dimension of quality-assurance frameworks for higher education and developing methodologies to support innovative advances at both the European and national levels;
- demonstrating ways that ICT can enhance learning by putting and keeping learners and communities at the centre of the quality or learning landscapes.
Claudio Dondi is convinced that EFQUEL is the right body to implement these statements: "Only a network that is strong in its membership orientation and linked with a broad range of stakeholders is able to fulfill such a mission. Given its tradition and mission, EFQUEL provides very fertile soil in which relations with leading representatives of other organizations can grow and flourish." This year, EFQUEL even extended this possibility on an international level: Around twenty percent of the participants at the Innovation Forum 2009 came from outside Europe.
The international dimension of the EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2009 was also reflected in the choice of the keynote speakers: Nnenna Nwakanma represented Africa in her speech and pointed out the meaning of opening education. Muneo Yoshikawa from Japan impressed the participants with his double-swing model for learning.
Closer to home, some of Europe's most well-known speakers, like Gilly Salmon (University of Leicester, UK) and Markku Markkula (Aalto University, Finland) gave an overview of the future development of eLearning. Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz (Adviser to the Director, Directorate General for Education and Culture) and Brian Holmes (Head of Unit at the European Commission's Executive Agency) represented the policy dimension in their speeches.
The EFQUEL Forum 2009 was not only innovative in its program: This year, the Foundation streamed the speeches live via the internet. Around 200 visitors from all over the world followed the broadcast and had the opportunity to comment via a Twitter backchannel. Rolf Reinhardt was unequivocal in his comment, saying "Streaming the event live proved that EFQUEL is doing much more than only talking about the promotion of ICT for learning and how to assure or develop quality by inclusiveness. Among others, we are demonstrating how the conferences of the future might look and what possibilities effectively applied technology offers!"
