News From Our Partners & Colleagues: 5th Annual Groningen Declaration Network Meeting
Working towards digital student data portability
4 May 2016
Signatories to the Groningen Declaration will meet for the 5th annual Groningen Declaration Network (GDN) meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. The meeting will take place from the 17th to 19th May 2016.
This year’s meeting coincides with the 20thanniversary celebration of its host, the South African Qualifications Authority. Promoting genuine qualifications and the use of bona fide digital student data will be the common denominator running through this meeting.
The theme for this year’s meeting, “A Digital World for All: Making Skills Mobile”, accurately reflects the ambitions and potential of the GDN. Skills, being a person’s attainments in terms of academic training, professional experience or otherwise, are digitally articulated and exchanged and should be accepted, as a person’s “legal skills tender.” That would make skills truly mobile.
The GDN is a network of like-minded organisations working towards establishing “a more complete and far-reaching delivery of digital student data.” This network was founded in April 2012 at the end of the seminar on ‘Digital Student Data Depositories Worldwide’ held in Groningen in the Netherlands.
The gathering had one common goal: to develop secure and complete digital platforms for student data as a response to increasing student mobility. The Groningen Declaration stated, among other things: “As we see it, digital student data portability and digital student data depositories are becoming increasingly concrete and relevant realities, and in the years to come, they will contribute decisively to the free movement of students and skilled workers on a global scale.” The GDN’s work is also important as it helps combat the misrepresentation of qualifications and document falsification which is becoming a serious challenge and is receiving worldwide attention.
To date, there are 41 signatories to the Declaration and 15 are expected to sign at the Cape Town Meeting. The results of pilot projects on digital student data portability will also be showcased at the meeting.
Issued by: SAQA
Enquiries: Joe Samuels, SAQA CEO
Contact details: 012 431 5001 or 082 833 1271 or jsamuels@saqa.co.za