EdTech blog by Alexander Mikroyannidis

FORGE has kicked-off!

By Alexander Mikroyannidis24 October 201323 February 2019Semantic Web, Technology-Enhanced Learning

Last week saw the kick-off meeting of the FORGE project (Forging Online Education through FIRE). FORGE is a 3-year FP7 project led by the Open University. The consortium consists of 7 partners highly experienced in eLearning and FIRE (Future Internet Research & Experimentation). The meeting was hosted by the University of Patras in Greece. John Domingue, Aneta Tumilowicz and me represented the Open University.

FORGE will develop methodologies and best practices for offering world-class FIRE facilities to learners and educators, related both to communications and IT, but also to other disciplines including social sciences. Within the FORGE project we will:

Study and develop new processes and approaches to online learning based on the integration of FIRE facilities and eLearning technologies.
Inject into the higher education learning sphere the FIRE portfolio of facilities and tools.
Introduce the learning community to the concepts of Experimentally Driven Research.
Increase the overall accessibility and usability of FIRE facilities through the layering of how-to-use resources over the FIRE platforms.

From a learning technology perspective, FORGE will build upon new trends in online education. Firstly, in online educational platforms such as iTunes U, as well as in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) we see the large-scale take-up and use of rich media content. These include video in a variety of formats including webcasts and podcasts and eBooks, which can contain multimedia and interactive segments. eBooks provide a new level of interactivity since specific learning text, images and video can be closely integrated to interactive exercises. FORGE will enable students to setup and run FIRE experiments from within rich related learning content embedded as widgets inside interactive eBooks.

Professional biography

Dr. Alexander Mikroyannidis is a Senior Research Fellow (Associate Professor) in the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, UK. He holds a Ph.D. in Informatics from Manchester Business School, an M.Phil. in Computation from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), and a B.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece.

Research interests

The research expertise of Dr. Mikroyannidis is in the field of Technology-Enhanced Learning. He has been investigating the use of novel educational technologies for enhancing personalised learning, self-regulated learning, lifelong learning, as well as open education. He is currently working on the transformative applications of Generative AI and decentralisation blockchain technology in the context of online and distance education. He is the author of over 120 peer-reviewed publications that have received over 1,600 citations (20 h-index). He sits on the editorial boards of several globally renowned scientific journals, such as Open Learning, a leading international journal in the field of open, flexible and distance learning.

Teaching interests

Dr. Mikroyannidis has extensive experience in developing rich interactive learning materials for Open Educational Resources (OERs), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Badged Open Courses (BOCs), and eBooks. Some highlights from this work are the following:

Impact and engagement

The work of Dr. Mikroyannidis has led to strategic partnerships with key technological companies, most notably with Cisco and its global educational network, the Cisco Networking Academy, which has over 1 million students worldwide. Within this partnership, Dr. Mikroyannidis is in charge of the design, development and deployment of PT Anywhere, a novel educational tool for teaching computer networking skills by performing network simulations on any device. PT Anywhere has played a vital role in remote teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been featured in the UK government’s Digital Skills Toolkit, which is offering essential digital skills to job seekers.

Dr. Mikroyannidis has recently led a successful pilot for facilitating lifelong learning using blockchain technologies, in the context of the European project QualiChain. In particular, he has been in charge of deploying and evaluating decentralised education and employment qualifications with learners and educators within various lifelong learning contexts. As outlined in this journal article, the results of this pilot have provided valuable insights into the different aspects of lifelong learning that require support, as well as into the guidance and training needs of the education community related to the use of decentralisation technologies. More recently, Dr. Mikroyannidis has been investigating the impact of Web 3.0 and Blockchain on open education, aiming to reduce barriers for the open upskilling and reskilling of job seekers. For more info, see this journal editorial co-authored with several other renowned experts in the field of open education.

External collaborations

Dr. Mikroyannidis has been driving significant educational technology initiatives at an international level, by establishing a network of collaborators inside and outside the Open University and acquiring external funding, in order to implement and evaluate novel educational solutions in real-life settings and with real users. He has been awarded and worked on a wide range of European and nationally funded research projects, including SAGE-RAI, QualiChain, DEL4ALL, OpenLang Network, Open Networking Lab, Institute of Coding, SlideWiki, EDSA, HUB4NGI, FORGE, weSPOT, EUCLID, ROLE, OpenScout, CASPAR, and PARMENIDES.

In collaboration with the European partners of the Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network, Dr. Mikroyannidis has led the design, implementation and evaluation of the OpenLang Network platform. This platform provides an open and collaborative online learning environment that brings together language teachers and learners across Europe. This journal article presents the sustainable design of the platform and the tools that the platform is offering for practicing innovative learning methods, such as tandem language learning. The goal of this work is to foster the European multicultural and multilingual vision by building a sustainable online community around open educational resources and practices.