Hi everyone,
In case you missed our short reflection on day 1 of Learning Impact Europe 2026, please visit this link. It’s essential before you continue to day 2.
It really is!
Not only about the event
Apart from the event report, this post would be poor if we didn't spend some time talking about the city. Thessaloniki blends a rich history of Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman cultures with a lively energy from its large university population.
It is famous for the iconic White Tower, scenic waterfront promenades, and has a celebrated culinary scene that comes from the various cultural influences Thessaloniki has lived through.
When we were not attending the event, we took every opportunity we could, to take everything in, walking the city street, or running them. We'll show some proof later on. For now, let's go back to the event.
16/9 | 09:00-09:30
Day 2 kicked off with Mr. Tim Couper and his session “Ecosystem Roadmap for Europe”. In this session we got a chance to see the roadmap of the 1EdTech work in Europe. The presentation highlighted the CASE standard as a means for systems to exchange and manage information about learning standards and competencies in a consistent and digitally-referenceable way.
16/9 | 09:30-10:00
Next up was the session from Ms. Sahra-Josephine Hjorth, titled “The technology finally arrived. It may destroy EdTech: What survives when learning moves into AI.” The presentation was making a bold and provocative prediction, that 90-95% of today’s EdTech may close, consolidate, be repurposed or become functionally irrelevant because of the advent of AI. Nevertheless quite a bleak statement that was brought forth with a set of evidence to support it.
Although I have to admit that I didn’t feel that the claim of the presentation is valid overall, I did feel that parts of it also apply to us. So, I did take the message with me and reflected a lot on how AI affects us, as we have been doing as a team for quite some time now. We will be posting about this soon, so stay tuned.
16/9 | 10:15-11:00
For the next part, we joined “Connecting 1EdTech Standards to European Frameworks” where Mr. Pirih and Mr. Tück held an interesting discussion on the existing European Standards that are created from various organizations and initiatives and how the 1EdTech Standards can align with them to provide a way to carry skills, competencies and knowledge across continents.
16/9 | 11:45-13:00
After the keynote, two equally interesting presentations followed in Hall 1, namely “Open Standards and Shared Ecosystems in Higher Education Collaboration” from Mr. Ham and “Standardising API Discovery for International Interoperability” from Mr. van der Molen, Mrs. Renders and Mr. Tück on how information on HigherEd courses can be shared over a decentralized ecosystem.
16/9 | 14:00-15:15
After a much needed lunch break, we joined the awards finalist session where we had the pleasure of watching our Belgian colleagues joining from GO!, Nina and Steven, Steven and Nina, presenting their work “From Fragmentation to Governance: An Interoperable Learning Ecosystem”. Later in the afternoon the work of our colleagues received one of the Learning Impact Europe Awards for their great work.
16/9 | 15:45-16:45
For the next session I moved to Hall 2 as it was time for our colleague Shana to present her amazing work in the context of her PhD “Designing Meaningful Engagement Dashboards for Workplace Learning”. It was a really interesting presentation that reflected on the use of dashboards in a workplace setting, showcasing the ongoing research findings and how these will be feeding into a meaningful dashboard for learners, educators and decision makers. After the end of the presentation, questions flew in and a very engaging discussing took place. #proud
...and that's a wrap for day 2!
The second day ended with more celebrations and lively discussions during the conference dinner at Kitchen Bar at the Port of Thessaloniki.
Learning Impact Europe (day 2)