The Finnish EduCloud Alliance and the German Bündnis für Bildung have agreed upon a cooperation, in which the two national alliances have exchanged memberships.
“I am extremely pleased that EduCloud Alliance has managed to expand its network on an international scale, particularly now in Germany. We are looking forward to establish the cooperation with the Bündnis für Bildung. The aim of this cooperation is to exchange of information on technology as well as common standards used in the Finnish and German educational systems. With this cooperation Educloud Alliance wants to facilitate an open dialog and networking between the members of the two alliances. We wish to increase the cooperation of edtech companies and startups in order to develop the EdTech industry in Europe“, states Timo Väliharju, Chairman of the Finnish EduCloud Alliance.
“It is vitally important that we begin to combine our efforts within Europe as so many of us are dealing with the same challenges and working on similar solutions. Through targeted collaborations, we can learn from each other and support our respective education environments more thoroughly. With so many of the same goals and ideals, working together with the EduCloud Alliance is an exciting opportunity for the Bündnis für Bildung to expand their knowledge base and contribute to expansive solutions for the European market with the work from their task forces”, says Beth Havinga, Executive Director of the Bündnis für Bildung e.V.
The German Alliance for Education (Bündnis für Bildung e.V.) is a unique organisation that brings both members of the state and federal education ministries and representatives from Education industry from large tech corporations, to education institutions and startups in Germany together to develop reference frameworks, reference models and position papers. The aim of the Alliance is to further develop digital education environments within the German market. The models and architectures developed by the Alliance directly support the political and market activities of all parties within the education environment in Germany. The German Alliance for Education boasts a number of active task forces for members and external experts to work together on topics dedicated to supporting the digitisation of education such as interoperability and data protection, digital infrastructure in schools, and school transformation processes.
EduCIoud Alliance (ECA) is an alliance for the implementation of an open educational cloud service standard (EduCloud), which has been initiated by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. It aims to build a nation-level ecosystem focusing on international awareness, which connects users, purchasers, developers and service providers of learning services. The alliance promotes and builds the digital market of learning technology and content by building a common open standard for learning environments, materials and activities to facilitate the open provision, sales, finding, comparison and use of educational cloud service products and contents. It allows digital learning materials to be produced, acquired and deployed on online learning platforms or other learning network services in an easier manner. The focus areas for the year 2018 are: promotion of the procurement of learning services, learning analytics and analytical interfaces, approval management and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), authentication (MPASSid), the reference implementation and also OID, i.e. National learner identifying code.
More information:
Timo Väliharju
Chairman, EduCloud Alliance
+358 50 330 3339
timo.valiharju@educloudalliance.org
Beth Havinga
Executive Director, Bündnis für Bildung e.V.
+49 (0) 151 680 785 20
info@bfb.org
