Learning Individuals and Learning Communities: Informal Learning in 2025

PublicationThis Paper presents the Learnovation vision within and around the area of informal learning, and more specifically it concerns three “eLearning territories”: individual development through e-Learning, nonprofessional learning communities, and communities generating learning as side effect. What these three territories have in common is that learning is not organised or structured, nor necessarily intentional from the learner’s perspective. A key assumption to understand the Learnovation Vision of ICT for informal learning is that the internet is no longer seen a “medium” for learning, but rather a “learning playground” where people can search for the tools and contents they prefer; and, more importantly, with the aid of web 2.0 technologies people can create, share, exchange, remix their own contents and learn through knowledge and experience exchange and sharing. Peer-learning and changing roles of “who teaches whom” are also typical for these three territories. The roles of provider–consumer are altering: learning isn’t anymore about “consuming” the learning products but about collaborating in an exercise where each learner can create his/her own knowledge patrimony and learn within the aid of tools and peers. Also, these territories are characterised by the speed of development and adaption of new technologies and trends. Furthermore, adoption, and even participation in the development of new tools and services is faster here than in formal learning settings. The Vision Paper is structured around three main blocks: state of art of innovation, expected future, and recommendations to reach the desired future scenario, the latter being composed of long term recommendations for 2025 and short term agenda on urgent actions to be taken starting from 2010 to let the desired scenario(s) come true

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and COPD: is it time to cross the diaphragm?

Editorial of "Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Institutional mapping of open educational practices beyond use of Open Educational Resources

Many initiatives exist to increase the adoption of open educational practices (OEP) within universities, but few initiatives start by exploring the capacity of educators to adopt open approaches. This paper addresses this challenge, suggesting that in order to build OEP capacity, universities should build on the existing skills of local champions who are familiar with open approaches. The paper builds on the Open Educators’ Factory methodology to map the capacities of university teachers across four areas: open design, open content, open teaching and open assessment and presents the results of its application to a case study within an Italian university. The pilot demonstrates that by using this approach, it is possible to map universities’ existing OEP and connect them with the capability of local educators. This enables university managers to build on the expertise of open education practitioners to raise the overall capacity of their staff to adopt open approaches

Evolving Diversity II: Participation of students with an immigrant background in European Higher Education

EQUNET is a 3-year project researching the state of equity in Higher Education in Europe. The project aims to create an evidence-based policy advocacy network, so as to promote its conclusions as a way to promote better-informed policy making on equity issues in Europe. This is the second of three reports, and is dedicated to improving the picture of equity in access to Higher Education in Europe for persons of immigrant origin. The report provides a theoretical framework for discussion of the topic, a statistical cross-country analysis of access-figures, as well as detailed country-studies for Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom. It is the result of a year of research conducted by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers originating from across Europe. (DIPF/Orig.

The Role of Nuclear Receptors in the Pathophysiology, Natural Course, and Drug Treatment of NAFLD in Humans.

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) describes steatosis, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis with or without fibrosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma, namely the entire alcohol-like spectrum of liver disease though observed in the nonalcoholic, dysmetabolic, individual free of competing causes of liver disease. NAFLD, which is a major public health issue, exhibits intrahepatic triglyceride storage giving rise to lipotoxicity. Nuclear receptors (NRs) are transcriptional factors which, activated by ligands, are master regulators of metabolism and also have intricate connections with circadian control accounting for cyclical patterns in the metabolic fate of nutrients. Several transcription factors, such as peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors, liver X receptors, farnesoid X receptors, and their molecular cascades, finely regulate energetic fluxes and metabolic pathways. Dysregulation of such pathways is heavily implicated in those metabolic derangements characterizing insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome and in the histogenesis of progressive NAFLD forms. We review the role of selected NRs in NAFLD pathogenesis. Secondly, we analyze the role of NRs in the natural history of human NAFLD. Next, we discuss the results observed in humans following administration of drug agonists or antagonists of the NRs pathogenically involved in NAFLD. Finally, general principles of treatment and lines of research in human NAFLD are briefly examined

Digital Libraries in Open Education: the Italy case,

Open Education strategies, and specifically MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) and OER (Open Educational Resources), play an important role in supporting policies for educational innovation, lifelong learning, and, more generally, the enlargement of educational opportunities for all. While there is an increasing interest in Open Education, there is little awareness about the role of Digital Library as learning incubators for learning enhancement. The paper presents briefly the state of art of Digital libraries in the light of the most recent initiatives of Open Education in Italy, towards an integrated model of Digital libraries as “knowledge and learning open hubs”

Openness in Teachers’ Digital Competence Frameworks: Looking for the Open Educator

There has been a wide variety of definitions of digital competence, from early narrow and technology-focused explanations to more recent attempts , such as the one by Ferrari (2013), who describes it as a complex concept encompassing a wide set of skills, attitudes and knowledge when performing tasks with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Furthermore, there have been various different attempts to describe teachers’ digital competence, as the literature review by McGarr and McDonagh (2019) demonstrates. These authors evidence that models either depict teachers’ digital competence in diverse taxonomies of areas and dimensions, or as a hierarchical and progressive evolution from low to high levels of awareness and ability. They observe that openness does not have a presence in most of the taxonomic models and thus they propose openness as a dimension of their four-part model, under the label of attitudes. In this current work, we analyse international and national teachers’ digital competence frameworks and review whether openness has been included in them, and, if so, how it is described. In the case of frameworks that offer a model of increasing performance, we observe the levels at which open-related concepts appear. An initial review of the frameworks by the European Commission, UNESCO, ISTE (US) and INTEF (Spain) indicates that ‘openness’ typically does not constitute a dimension in itself and tends to appear at intermediate and high levels of teachers’ digital competence, except from the UNESCO framework, where access to OER (Open Educational Resources) is present already at the lowest level. In this paper we reflect on the need for international and national frameworks of teacher professional development to boost openness: in particular, for open educational practices to be included at lower levels of teachers’ pre-service and in-service professional education. We argue that becoming an open educator requires both the development of the dispositions associated with reflective practice and the confidence to challenge neo-liberal educational assumptions in order to embrace participatory, equitable and open educational practices from the early stages of the development of teachers’ digital competence. References Ferrari, A. (2013) ‘DIGCOMP: A Framework for Developing and Understanding Digital Competence in Europe‘, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Available at: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC83167/lb-na-26035-enn.pdf McGarr, O. & McDonagh, A. (2019) ‘Digital Competence in Teacher Education‘, Output 1 of the Erasmus+ funded Developing Student Teachers’ Digital Competence (DICTE) project. Available at: https://dicte.oslomet.no/ Tur, Gemma; Marín, Victoria I.; Havemann, Leo; Keefer, Jeffrey; Marsh, J. Dawn; Nascimbeni, Fabio; Crump, Helen; Baker, Nick and García Vallejo, Mari Cruz (2018). Open Education as a threshold concept in Teacher Education: a theoretical framework for further research. In: OER18: Open to All, 18-19 Apr 2018, Bristol. http://oro.open.ac.uk/58239/ Tur, G., Havemann, L., Marsh, D., Keefer, J. M., & Nascimbeni, F. (2020). Becoming an open educator: towards an open threshold framework. Research in Learning Technology, 28. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v28.233

Fostering Openness in Education: Considerations for Sustainable Policy-Making

This paper reviews a framework to support the co-creation of policies to sustainably foster Open Education. The framework has been derived from a comprehensive review of public and Open Education policy documents and related literature, as well as identification and consideration of contiguous issues in the education landscape that directly impact openness and can potentially derail policies, including datafication, copyright reforms, and the unbundling of services into component parts. The open policy framework, along with a canvas and set of change cards and a dynamic grounded in the participation and co-creation standard developed by the Open Government Partnership, have been used in three workshops piloted during 2018, to facilitate co-design of Open Education policies, by discussing contexts, objectives and challenges with policymakers and advisors both at national and institutional levels, policymakers and advocates with a series of tools and advise to enable arenas to co-create open-education policies

Can Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) be considered as Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Open Education has changed many times over the last decades: After a first boom in the middle of the last century, there was a decline in interest. In our current century, Open Education gained more popularity through the introduction of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Nevertheless, the current focus is different from the past. This article is the start of a series to contribute to a better grasp of the complexity that Open Education is covering. It is a challenge as it is not an empirical article but philosophical argumentation: It discusses the question whether MOOCs can be considered as OER. Open Education and OER can be seen and treated as two strands with different developments even though, in theory, OER belongs to Open Education. Different OER definitions and typologies are analyzed and compared in relation to their dimensions and categorizations. Furthermore, the four conditions and two original types of MOOCs are discussed leading to a debate on their quality. It turns out that there are two perspectives of MOOCs: From the OER point of view, MOOCs as a product can be called an OER if they are fulfilling the OER definition and requirements. From the Open Education point of view, MOOCs are going beyond OER as enablers of Open Education understood as innovative concept and methodology for changing education towards collaborative and moderated learning experiences. That is reflected by the dimensions of the introduced OpenEd Quality Framework and is confirming the need of the two distinctions. Therefore the short answer to our leading question: "Are MOOCs Open Educational Resources?" is: sometimes and it depends from the perspective that you take