Webinar Recording Available!

From Prior Learning Assessment to Open Recognition

With featured Panelists:

• Serge Ravet (France)
  
• Don Presant (Canada
• Julie Keane (U.S.A.)

In this new PLAIO webinar, we continued to examine ideas, practices, and research introduced at the ePIC conference 2025 in Paris, France — the focus of two special issues of PLAIO, the first of which is now available (plaio.org).

This 90-minute session explored how we think about “open” and how our use of the term “recognition” pushes us beyond narrower understandings of assessment. We asked an honest and unsettling question: Has recognition truly become more open or has it simply become more efficient at reproducing old hierarchies? As "The Paris Declaration on the Equality of Recognitions" affirms, recognition is a fundamental human practice. Yet as it expands, it is also at risk of being re-enclosed — through standardization, institutional control, and the logics of micro-credentials. Our goal is to examine that tension directly.

The webinar mapped the deeper fault lines running through today's open recognition landscape: questions of knowledge and power (who decides what is worth recognizing?); ethics and responsibility (can recognition exclude while claiming to include?); institutional autonomy (are we building alternatives or extensions of existing systems?); and the realities of recognition as it actually happens in workplaces and communities.

We also explored a fundamental conceptual shift — from recognition of learning to recognition as learning — asking: What changes when recognition becomes a relationship rather than a transaction, an infrastructure rather than an output?

Rather than offering neat conclusions, the session surfaced what remains unresolved and kept the spirit of ePIC 2025 and of PLAIO alive as an ongoing conversation.

The recording is available at: