This week I was in Thessaloniki for the second SIG-EDU meeting and attending the 1EdTech Learning Impact conference.

I have been to Greece before, visiting Zante and Kefalonia on holidays in the 2000s. However, I had not visited the Greek mainland before. I also realised this was the first European conference I had been to which was in southern Europe. I think the furtherest south I had been before (in Europe) was Brest in Brittany (northern France). Though it was in September, it was still very warm with temperatures in the high twenties. I arrived in Greece on the Monday having spent most of the day travelling.

Both the SIG-EDU meeting and the 1EdTech Learning Impact conference were taking place at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

The SIG-EDU meeting focus was on interoperability and procurement. One of my colleagues from Jisc did a great presentation about licensing and procurement.

Across the week there were various sessions on standards, interoperability and examples from across Europe. It was also great to discuss issues and challenges with European colleagues and learn what was working and what wasn’t.

I did get a bit of a reputation at the conference for asking questions about the concept of a home institution, something I should really write a blog post about in the future.

As with most conferences some sessions were insightful and really useful for me, others, were, well, not really for me.

Across my career, I have come to realise the importance of scalability and ramping up ideas that will work with thousands of students well beyond the scope of an initial pilot or small scale project. I wrote this back in 2018 on scaling up pilots.

One lesson I would pass on, is if you are undertaking a small scale pilot is to reflect on how it would scale in the future. It’s not just about how the technology, device or process enhances and enriches teaching and learning, but what about all the other stuff. Logistics, charging, storage, training, support, staff development, sustainability, and end of life.

Much of that post was about scaling up institutional pilots to be delivered across the whole institution. Today, working for Jisc, I have come to appreciate the need to sometimes scale up pilots to a national level.

In the area of interoperability that does mean when thinking about the eight use cases of the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework for example, this means not just scaling up at a national level, but also internationally.

Thankfully no delay to the flight home this week.