First transnational partner meeting in Heilbronn

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From October 8th to 10th 2019, the ECCOE partners came together in Heilbronn, Germany for the kick-off meeting of the ECCOE project. The meeting was hosted by the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg / DHBW).

This meeting was the first opportunity for partners from France, Malta, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Germany to meet face to face. We had already held an online meeting right at the launch of the project in September, but even though we’re all experienced in remote working, and many of us have worked together on other projects, a physical meeting is vital for more in-depth discussion, and of course to develop group cohesion around a common goal. Indeed, forging and fostering interpersonal, working relationships is vital to a project’s success, and we all felt that, by the end of the three days, we had succeeded in refining our shared understanding of what we want to achieve in ECCOE, and in determining how we would work together over the coming three years.

The partnership brings together a wealth of expertise in digital credentials, and in open, online and flexible education. Some of the things we covered were:

  • who are the main stakeholders concerned by digital credentials?
  • what should a digital credential look like?
  • what are the processes from the point of view of learners, higher education institutions and employers?
  • what are the barriers to greater uptake and how can we overcome them?

We’re obviously just at the start of the project, but as I write this post I can see that we’ve made impressive progress over this short period. We look forward to sharing intermediate results as they become available, and to gathering feedback from the wider community through our public consultations and open peer review.

I would thus like to take this opportunity to thank all the ECCOE partners for their enthusiasm and commitment to the project, and also thank the people we’ve met who have expressed interest in and support for ECCOE. You can expect to hear more from us very shortly!

Deborah Arnold
ECCOE coordinator
National and international projects coordinator
AUNEGe – digital university for management and economics, France