"If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children".

This quote by Confucius often rings true today as well. However, the world has changed - we no longer speak only about educating children, but educating adults, educating our workforce, giving them new skills and competencies to be competitive in contemporary world. It is a world where we talk about not just educating, but educating efficiently, about recognising the existing competencies of a person to offer them customized learning opportunities.

It is in this context that we need to take a good and hard look at recognition agenda in education and especially in tertiary education. We need to analyze our recognition systems and see if they are in accordance with modern requirements. We need to talk to each other, share our experiences and practices and pool our resources together to meet global challenges.

Nordic-Baltic region is one that has emerged recently as one of the forerunners in discussions about recognition in tertiary education. Consisting of countries with different historic backgrounds they are nevertheless similar in their pursuit of development of recognition systems, to provide flexible learning opportunities to adults and children alike. From EC-funded projects to national initiatives, there are countries in the region that have tried to approach challenges from different perspectives and created new knowledge in the process.

The seminar ’Exchanging Practices on RPL – Learning from Nordic-Baltic Experiences’ is the first attempt to approach recognition of prior learning (RPL) from regional perspective – to bring together experts and developers from academic and non-academic world to share and discuss theirexperiences, so we would be better prepared to meet the challenges that we face ahead.

See the seminar website here.