Portugal’s northern “capital”, Porto, hosted TeSLA’s project International Event show. In the beautiful setting of Ribeira, just by the Douro river, consortium members and guests from across Europe and US gather to discuss the project’s outcome, share ideas around eLearning and shed some light on the future of distance education.
As this project comes to an end it becomes paramount to effectively communicate what we have learned along the way, how project goals were achieved and present evidence of these achievements. It’s our responsibility as a consortium and as individuals to demonstrate that the investment made when funding this project has palpable results: a trust system that works and it’s feasible, effectively giving back to society by the means of bringing innovation to learning.
There were two main goals on this event:
Both goals were achieved: a significant increase in website and social media traffic was registered and event attendees had the opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions throughout the day, stablishing connections that, we are sure, will prove fruitful soon enough.
As expected, regulatory compliance (GDPR) is one of the concerns commonly shared when discussing systems that leverage on collecting users’ biometric data and that reflected on panel discussion. Such concerns have been addressed early on when designing TeSLA system and software architecture, with special attention to data retention policies, data minimization anonymization.
This aspect of the project (data protection and compliance) has shown the added value of having a diverse and heterogenous consortium: our legal advisors (consortium member Université de Namur) have pushed the agenda since day one, well before GDPR was on everyone’s mind, effectively shaping the way architecture design decisions were made. If this wasn’t the case, maybe the project outcome wouldn’t be so bright.
Finally, there is an underlying goal for these events, probably the most relevant of all: allow people that have been collaborating for 34 months to get together, meet face-to-face and discuss project details, decisions, roadmaps, struggles and difficulties, mitigate problems and celebrate success. Such meetings have taken place in the past and they have proven to be fundamental to project success, by complementing the well stablished communication protocols, bi-weekly Project Management meetings and continuous bi-lateral communication channels.
In the end, such project success will depend on the willingness of people behind it and TeSLA project members have been pushing for project success relentlessly.
Our applause goes out to all of them.
FUNDED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION
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