Dear friends,
Looking back we have to say that Europe has seen better years. The past year was marked by formerly unthinkable developments and threats. These have also partly overshadowed successful developments in our community. For this reason we feel that European collaboration is more important than ever.
Despite the annoying and frightening global developments in 2016, our communities of internal and external partners have worked extremely well in projects like IMPACT, PROMOTE, EILEEN, EELLSS, THREE C, VALLEY and SASSI.
A big thank you for all your creativity, expertise and commitment!
The LEVEL5 approach has not only been used as validation instrument but increasingly also as planning approach for competence based and situative learning. With this, LEVEL5 has evolved into a holistic approach coupling innovative learning with validation in various learning environments.
Achievements in 2016:
Since our tenth anniversary, celebrated in Mechelen in September 2015, we have done a thorough investigation of more than 100 European ECVET projects (with astonishing results), developed a specification and a first ECVET-software connected to LEVEL5.
We also connected the LEVEL5 validation software with open source learning technologies (Mahara and Moodle) which provides a seamless journey through e-Portfolio, LMS and validation both for learners and learning providers. With this also (KA1) course providers may offer holistic, state of the art web-based and blended learning offers to their learners and include validation in a tailor-made way in their courses and learning activities.
In 2016, 20 projects and 3 networks have been using the my-VITA platform. We have just given access to the 850th user – which means that we have almost tripled the amount of learners within the last two years.
What comes next? There will be a few changes in 2017:
blinc – the blended learning institutions’ cooperative – will remain your community for European project development related to innovative education and sustainable development. blinc is run by committed European partners who develop, provide and promote their services through the community. It is organised as a cooperative and consists of organisations and individual shareholders that join with the intention to invest capital, creativity or human resources in the development of their new ideas and joint ventures.
There is a second group of partners and friends who are more interested in participating in our projects, workshops and conferences than in joint product and service development. For those community members we are about to establish a less formal organisation – the REVEAL association.
REVEAL will be a non-profit organisation established under German law. It can be accessed without any membership fees. On the one hand, REVEAL will keep you in contact with all the community members and act as a dissemination platform for services, products, infrastructures and projects of our members. On the other hand, it will also provide special offers and reduced fees for the services of the community members, e.g. in connection with the LEVEL5 learning and validation software, for joint project developments, for participation in European courses and for the transfer of successful HR concepts in partner countries.
For the whole network the perspectives for 2017 are good since we have successfully developed large scale projects on innovative learning approaches, on capacity building and sustainable development that will secure the future of our community for at least the coming two years.
We hope that you may be interested in becoming part of these developments. We are convinced that together we can make a difference and create new values for our projects, communities and societies.
Our best wishes for a happy, successful and peaceful year 2017!
Tim