Unlocking eSignature Legitimateness for Higher Education in European Union

How to eSign a document: eSignature legitimateness for Higher Education in European Union

it's it's a season of birthdays so this year it's the 40th anniversary of the University Institute this year is also the 20th anniversary of the Maggie squad Oscar curvy actions the researcher mobility next year will be the searches anniversary of the Erasmus program lots of lots of birthdays all in one go and I think it's a good time to look back and to see where we've come from and also to see how much progress we've made I should mention also that in 2018 of course it will be the 20th anniversary of the Bologna process also so lots of education and research birthdays and at the moment Monroe marine this morning recalled the very very strong opposition that there was from some countries to the very idea of cooperation on education and training you mentioned how difficult it was to get agreement on the recognition of diplomas between different countries and as you were talking Commissioner I have to call you that as you were talking I thought to myself you could be talking about now it's not actually so different when I'm talking in the Education Committee of the council or in the official groups in the Bologna process I get just the same arguments coming back education is a fundamental responsibility and competence of the member states or in some cases of regions within those member states why on earth is Europe getting involved I think probably all of us in this room here know why I think we know that every country has an interest in the educational performance of its neighbors we all benefit from highly educated populations in our own country and abroad they are the basis for sustainable and peaceful development in the world so it's absolutely essential that we do everything we can to improve the quality of education wherever that might be whether it's in Europe or in the developing world or in newly industrialized countries to the matter we must invest in that and that's why the Commission has over the years developed different ways of working with education stakeholders with ministries with associations of universities universities individually themselves why we developed of course is how very clearly recalled this morning the Erasmus program and the impact that Erasmus has had Commissioner Marine you shouldn't really have admitted that in public that Erasmus is about taking competence from the Member States it's the sort of the untold secret behind the program but it certainly has done that we all know that without Erasmus the Bologna process wouldn't exist we all know that without Erasmus we wouldn't have the European credit and transfer system and Sasha I think is one of the great successes of Europe that the member states now use this system as though it were their own in that way our job is done so I'm very very pleased that is that that has happened I'm one of the rare European officials who doesn't mind if I don't always get the credit for these things but let's look a little bit also now the future and vertically at the the challenges and let's look at also some of the positive things because the expansion of higher education that we have seen over the last 30 years is a fantastic success we're at a situation now where nearly forty percent of young people in Europe have a higher education qualification they have had the benefits of a university education which makes them think differently which makes them more open which makes them more into culturally aware and that can only be a positive thing but we know that at the same time that increase in the number of students that we have brings with it very many problems very many problems and challenges for our university systems we have very many pockets of excellence in Europe we have some of the best higher education institutions in the world but we also know that not every student gets the value that he or she should from their higher education experience we know that there are graduates who end up in unemployment who have not been supported in the way that they need to be supported by their higher education systems because they come from different backgrounds because they haven't had the academic training they need before they get to university to be able to take advantage of it for example and we know also that universities find it very difficult to keep up with the changes in the labour market mr. caleca this morning said that the children who are going into primary school now sixty percent of them will end up in jobs that have not even been invented but even the time scale is often even shorter than that we know there was a study in Helsinki back in 2009 for example which tried to identified the 10 most in-demand jobs in the Helsinki area and they tried to adapt the programs at the University to meet that demand takes five years more or less in the finished system to Train somebody for those jobs five years later in 2014 not one of those jobs within the top ten not one so it's very very difficult for higher education institutions to try to predict the future to try to adapt their courses to the labour market so we need to be very careful about what we mean when we say we should focus on employability and making students job ready what we do need to do is to make sure that all of our graduates have what is being called these days a high level of t-shaped skills so that you have depth in your discipline but that you also have horizontal skills transversal skills problem solving critical thinking analysis not already team working communication skills languages all of these things which enable you to be successful in the labor market and to adapt to those changes now our curricula in many of our universities are not delivering that at the moment we carried out a public consultation earlier on this year where we asked universities and academics and universities and students and organisations stakeholder organizations and governments what they thought about the curricula in universities and what they told us was that around half of the students who responded felt their university course was not helping them to develop these transversal skills I thought that was quite surprising until I went to a meeting of the Coimbra groups not very long ago talking to some of the rector's and I gave him this statistic expecting them to react and say no no this is not true all of our universities are doing this and in fact the reaction was quite the opposite the reaction was yeah we know we know this is a problem and when we're talking about Coimbra we're talking about some of the best research universities in Europe so imagine what's happening in some of the others we also need to improve the the feedback that we get from graduates the knowledge that we have about what happens to our graduates now in lots of countries they do graduate surveys in some other countries they have administrative information so they're able to track graduates into the labor market and find out what happens to them on the basis of their tax number or their social security number something like that what we're not able to do at the moment is to compare those experiences across countries because the approach which is taken in different countries is very very different so the moment we're not really able to say whether there are any higher education systems in Europe which do this job better than others we know that there are different rates of graduate employment what we don't know is how much that is linked to the economic cycle how much it's linked to the mismatch between the quality of the education and the needs of the labour market we need to do a lot more work on that and that's something that we will focus on an oral to measure the outcomes the quality of the outcomes of the graduates many of you might have heard of the oecd's program called a hello the assessment of higher education learning outcomes which ran for how long the rake in 10 years no cost nine million dollars and then they stopped it because they couldn't get agreement on how to take this forward the idea was that you'd have international tests like the pisa tests which would enable you to assess the competencies that graduates come out with now obviously it's much more complicated at a higher education level than it is when you're testing literacy and maths and science skills at with 15 year olds and even though the OECD didn't manage to complete this work it's obvious it is absolutely essential that we are able to really test the skills of graduates at the moment we work on the basis of suspicion that maybe Oxford and Cambridge Imperial Leiden of sacral trashed as well that they have a high level of competences their graduates have a high level of competences when they leave and that maybe some other universities that you haven't heard of quite so much the level is lower is that true is there really a difference between bachelor degrees from different countries we have a very strong suspicion that there is but at the moment we can't measure it and that's something that we want to push forward and to try to develop ways of measuring these competences and to work with the universities to be able to do that but in the end the only way that you can improve the level of competencies of graduates is by investing in the teaching by improving the teaching which is going on in in universities and one thing that strikes answer is that in order to have a successful career in the university the last thing you should do is spend your time teaching it's very important to get published we've all heard of publish or perish it's very important to get published in the right journals you know to make sure that your citation index your citation score is very high so that you get noticed and that's the way you get tenure that's the way you get two positions in the in your university it's not from the student feedback that says yeah he or she is a great teacher and I've learned a lot with him or her that needs to change so we need to change the incentive structures for careers within universities so that people are rewarded for good teaching but we also need to get universities themselves to invest in teaching and to get beyond this idea that just because you have a PhD you're a great teacher because I think probably some of us here have come across cases where that's not necessarily the case so again here we want to work on this together to try to identify some good practices that we found across Europe we know that there are countries where there is more investment in teaching skills in universities than in others in the Netherlands now there is a requirement that all university teachers have to have a basic teaching qualification other initiatives in other countries in Ireland in the UK but what we need to do is to try to network these initiatives to try to spread them to other member states and to try to see what really works does it really make a difference for example in the Netherlands that all of these people have now gone through this process and having a few hours of pedagogical training has it made a difference to the way they teach let's see the other message sure another message that came back to us from our public consultation was about researchers and in particular junior researchers in universities and how they felt that they were treated guess this is something that might have a resonance here so more than half of the respondents and not just the junior researchers but more than half the response to our survey said that they felt that junior researchers were not support to develop their potential during their PhD candidate period or in their postdoc period so we have a problem here the people that we desperately need in order to increase the competitiveness of our economy and the innovativeness of our society are not getting the support in research organizations and in universities that they need one thing that goes along with that is looking at where our PhDs end up if you look at the US for example seventy-eight percent of people with a PhD are working in the private sector in Japan it's seventy-four percent is very close in China already to follow up on what maleic said it's sixty-two percent in Europe it's forty-five percent we are training people to be researchers in universities and we certainly need them but we need a lot more we need a lot more people who are going out into industry who are going out into the public sector and who are making the difference in the way that we work the way that we think the way that we design policies products and services some demand mentioned a challenge earlier on this afternoon about the way our universities are organized on the basis of sometimes highly independent faculties and how difficult it is to get them working with each other in an interdisciplinary way everybody talks about multidisciplinary these days as though we're all doing it but we're not and again the survey told us that people felt that interdisciplinary work not only was it not encouraged it was quite often penalized why are you going outside talking to them stay here stay with it within your discipline get depth in your discipline you don't want to be distracted by what's happening out there in the real world and yet in the real world we need that interdisciplinarity because that's how the world works we have another tool which some of you might have come across which is called you multi rank which is a ranking system for universities global system has about twelve thirteen hundred universities in it which for the first time on international scale looks at areas beyond research so it looks at the international profile of the universities it looks at knowledge transfer regional engagement of teaching and learning as well as the research side but looking just that research we ask them to try to identify which were the higher education institutions in Europe which were the most interdisciplinary in their research it wasn't the big comprehensive research universities it wasn't the League of European research universities Meg it was the small regional sometimes technical universities who were working with businesses all the time who were focused on solving real problems they were the ones doing the interdisciplinary research they have lessons that they can give to these big research universities about how to to deal with that that aspect that is very important because it's in the interdisciplinarity field it's in the areas between disciplines that you find innovation that's where the new comes from when you cross different fields together and we need to boost the role of higher education institutions in innovation and entrepreneurship in particular we have to build better systemic links between higher education institutions and their regions there are some fantastic examples here and there around the place it's still not it's still not unfortunately a generalization and again in our survey we were disappointed to see the only twenty percent of the respondents and that includes people representing universities only twenty percent of them were convinced that higher education institutions play a strong role in innovation at regional and national level so that's including the leaders of universities were coming back with that view so we have to do something about that about supporting regional engagement of our universities now I suppose a lot about the economic role of universities and fascial be very unhappy with that and she's right to be unhappy because higher education is not just about the labor market or competitiveness or innovation in products and services not that the reason I think that the European Union in particular has focused on this and spoken to on that side of it in particular since 2008 and the economic and financial crisis it focused on it because we saw that there was a massive problem of youth unemployment and that's almost everything that the EU did was devoted to relaunching jobs and growth I don't know if anybody taking year you want you're recording this aren't you so actually very careful about what I say now but I think that was a mistake I think that was a mistake and I think that what we have seen since in Europe in terms of social breakdown of the rise of inequality of disengagement of young people from political processes is in part a result of the over focus that we have had in the education systems on the labour market so we must not forget and I think it's physically important at the higher education level but we must not fit forget that higher education has a social and socializing role alongside its economic contribution so that means that higher education institutions have to be open to the surrounding community not just today to the leg market but to civil society organisations to cultural organizations and and there are again there are many good examples of this but it's important also because this is what's important to the more diverse student body that we have these days this is about ownership and engagement from students as well as giving back to the communities and I think that we see this particularly when we're talking now about the responsibility of the education systems to helping with the migration flow that we have at the moment the refugee issue in at least some of the member states of the European Union and higher education has a very important role to play and in some cases is hampered from doing it by the regulatory system within which they operate regulation is one thing funding is another and we haven't really thought much about funding today but the sustainable funding of higher education is a real issue in in many many countries we know that with growth of the stew population the resources which are devoted to higher education have simply not kept pace there are a couple of exceptions may be in in Europe so there is enormous pressure on the universities because funding per student has fallen enormously and even in countries where there's been a shift from public funding to privates no to a very high tuition fees for example that still hasn't compensated for the growth in student numbers but there's also pressure in order to ensure that there is better value and this again is something that was mentioned earlier the better value obtained from every euro which is invested in the higher education system so many countries are reforming their systems in order to try to tie their universities to various performance objectives they're being paid by results rather than per student these are experiments in many cases and we have to see whether they make a difference some of them look more promising than others but you really have to ask yourself whether a performance system can really achieve its objectives in systems which are structurally underfunded so there is a genuine problem of the level of funding as well as of the way the funding systems themselves are designed so what can we do about that because the funding that we have as welcome as it is too many European universities is really only a drop in the ocean compared to the overall spending by national governments on higher education systems what we can do is to provoke change can provoke reform by asking the difficult questions which often are not asked internally we can provide support to the people who are if you like the troublemakers in the system we can give weight to their views which they wouldn't have individually within a single country and we can do it by looking at cross-country comparisons by confronting ministries ministers with the results that other countries have achieved having changed their system we use for example we have the punishments to here so I'll use this example but we use very often the reforms that were carried out by the Polish government a few years ago in its education system which you'll forgive me Minister which the Polish government has never attributed to European reforms but which were very very closely based on the European framework of key competences which everybody agreed that young people should achieve by the age of 15 that made a big difference to the educational outcomes or 15 year olds in Poland and the impact in the position of Poland in the pisa tables was really quite remarkable they're moving from close to the bottom two above the European average now it's going to be another reform now in Poland I understand of that system so we're looking forward to see how that operates that fact being able to show the results of a reform in one country enables us to work with other countries to say this is what you could achieve to maybe the reforms won't be exactly the same but if you don't do if you don't do anything you'll make no change and this is what can actually help you we can do that in higher education to and we are going to focus in our work over the next few years on three main objectives firstly to try and support the improvements in teaching and learning that I've mentioned we will invest in skills forecasting working with said if op we will try to support projects between universities and the outside world in order to get this regional engagement we will help with projects which look at how digitalization can be brought into the higher education field in a more effective way supporting teacher training supporting the recognition of good teaching and working on projects on producing engaged citizens will focus on as our second area on regional innovation trying to boost the role of universities as centers of regional innovation working through the structural funds on smart specialisation strategies and trying to reward in particular interdisciplinary work and intersexual cooperation and then finally I want to mention as our third area something which has been worrying us for a couple of years which is the apparent divorce that there has been in higher education institutions between research on the one hand and teaching on the other I mentioned you know the focus on research though that we have and it's fine of course to incentivize excellent research we do it ourselves we think it's extremely important but it shouldn't be at the expense of teaching and it shouldn't be at the expense of teaching which is based on the very latest research the funding systems that we have in place at the moment tend to do that they tend to produce a card or excellent researchers and a second-rate of bank of teachers and we need to to change that and completely so we need to think of ways where we can help to overcome that problem for example by looking at the way the magic jury researcher mobility program works to build teaching support into that because we all know that our PhD candidates are probably going to be some of the first people that are undergraduate students come across in terms of their learning experience and with our postdocs to give them teaching qualifications to prepare them for for better better teaching in future and we also need to try to break down the very artificial barrier that we have at a European level between the European higher education area on the one hand and the European research area on the other these are two worlds which in theory overlaps and maybe seventy or eighty percent in practice these people never speak to each other that needs to change now we started with the 40th anniversary of the EU I so what's what can the EU I do I'll speak to the president on this point what can the EU I do well first of all you can carry on doing what you're doing now because the sort of activity that we have today looking back at the history of where we have come from and how we can move forward is extremely important in terms of developing new policies it's very important to have the insights of Commissioner marine for example in terms of what we were trying to do with a year Asmus program there are not so many people who remember that these days that's very important but you're also a very strong postgraduate institute which has managed to keep together these two sides of research and teaching you have experience there which is important not just for the Institute but for many peer organizations around Europe and I hope that we can work together and on that in terms of innovation in education the UI has a very established reputation very strong reputation sometimes people ask me does it have a very innovative reputation I look around here I think well it's new it's refurbished we have a screen but maybe there are things that can be done at the EU I also in terms of networking of interlinking of actually coming out of the school on the hill in order to be more innovative in the way it's it's working and I'm very much looking forward to working with you on the new ideas for the school of transnational governance in that respect you can also help as I think in terms of internationalization you're a very international institute one of the most international Institutes of higher education I think that there is in in in Europe maybe outside of the University of Luxembourg which is very very special they have to be they have to be international by definition and but again there are things there that we can learn from in the way that you integrate international stars in the way that you attract international students in the way that you follow up in particular with your students this is something that where we see a problem in many universities that international students come and go and that the contact with them is very often lost that's not what happens here not suggesting that we have an American system of alumni funding the the University forever but it may be the president is smiling so maybe he's thinking about that too so these are all areas where I think we can work together and some areas where the institute is leading some areas where it can develop and I very much look it look forward to this this modernization agenda for the Institute as well 40th birthdays we used to say in English that life begins at forty now that longevity has increased so much maybe it starts at fifty or sixty or maybe even higher but it's certainly clear that the yet the Institute is entering a new phase some very exciting things are happening new changes new schools being developed and I hope that in ten years time when we reach the half century will be able to look back at this anniversary to say that was the time that we entered this new phase that was the time when new developments started and where we formed the basis of what is going to be a very long and very successful relationship between the EU I the Member States and the European Union thank you very much for having [Applause]