Today, representatives from BMBF, DIPF, studiumdigitale and Open University NL discussed the potentials and challenges of the Nationale Bildung Platform (NBP) initiative by BMBF.
The BMBF is following a fresh and new approach to making the NBP actually become a sustainable platform.  This was great to see and is a very promising approach for digital education in Germany.

We first got a presentation of the KOMZERT project that works on the use case for the NBP.  KOMZERT aims to develop a virtualized training program for teachers that enables them to acquire methodological knowledge and digital skills in order to design their own teaching/learning scenarios in such a way that the potential of innovative educational technologies can be exploited. The teachers learn methods and tools that are used during the qualification and with which they can implement innovative teaching.

Thereafter, we discussed the potential role of the DIPF for the NBP project. DIPF is highly engaged in contributing to the NBP with their IWWB database and web-services for further education. As well as, their activities towards prior-knowledge accreditation for various vocational training jobs.

Finally, Prof. Dr. Rob Koper, PI of the EU FP6 IP project tencompetence addressed new opportunities and unsolved challenges of NBP from his experiences of TENCompetence project. TENCompetence was a 30 Million EU project for the development of a learning network for lifelong competence development. Some of the technologies are still in use and the overall insights and gained knowledge are still highly relevant for the objectives of the NBP. Rob captured the research outcomes of TENComptence and the Learning Networks program in an open book called Learning Network Services for Professional Development that suits the objective of the NBP and potential challenges to come. We compared the NBP project with TENcompetence and discussed the lessons we can learn from the former EU project. Finally, we came up with the following list of lessons learned from TENCompetence for the NBP project:

Opportunities:

  1. Agency of citizens:
    People are used to social media and knowledge to navigate such ecosystems
  2. Rich Content eco Systems:
    Rich eco-systems have emerged (MOOC Platforms like OpenHPI, Facebook etc,) how we do want to incorporate them?
  3. Available Data and Metadata increased:
    There is much more digital data and meta-data about courses available, so position and navigating of learners in a learning network should be much more feasible compared to 2008
  4. Cloud Systems are accepted
    The technology Software as Service and centralised servers/cloud is more accepted than in 2008
  5. Didactics are still valid:
    The big message is that all the didactics and learning models from the 10CC project are still up to date and the NBP can refer to this knowledge.
  6. Focus on further education:
    Maybe doing lifelong learning from birth to death is too ambitious, for NBP, also because of the federal system. Maybe NBP should mainly address the further education domain as this is not regulated.

Challenges:

  1. Open Content?!:
    Can everything really be freely available? Quality reduces, publishers will not join in the effort. So think about if everything can be freely available.
  2. Assessment:
    Assessment needs to be involved in the learning process -> Maybe more a feedback system, vocational training system rather than an isolated assessment system. Train real skills.
  3. Importance of informal learning.
    DIPF is providing with MySkills here an exciting service to accredit prior-knowledge
  4. Involvement:
    How to involve existing players: There are many Knowledge Management models, so how to address them -> have a unified set of problems, and create a common architecture 
  5. Meta-data: How to not end in extensive Meta-Data discussions as they have been there in the past and do not solve a lot.