The provision of quality education and equal opportunities for lifelong learning for all are key objectives of international and European education policies (European Commission 2021; United Nations 2020). One of the key points is the development of a powerful and productive digital education ecosystem, which includes not only high-quality learning content and digital educational media and tools, but also a secure platform that supports learning, is user-friendly and respects current data protection laws (European Commission 2020).

For this reason, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has initiated the development of such an educational ecosystem - the "Nationale Bildungsplattform". The "Bildungsraum Digital" (BIRD), which has been under development since 2021, is a prototype of this educational ecosystem. BIRD enables the testing of data transfer structures, the interoperability of different types of platforms and the implementation of standards. This contribution to the European educational space aims to provide a way to connect existing and new educational platforms across all sectors of education. It is an important step towards the creation of an educational ecosystem that recognises the diversity and federal structure of the German education system, as well as the associated independence of actors and platforms.

Diversity, however, does not only apply to the different fields of education, but also to the diversity of potential users who could benefit from the educational space. Some important dimensions are the different ages, personal circumstances, educational experiences, and financial and time resources of potential learners. Social inequalities (Verständig et al. 2017) can be considered in addition to the approach of Gardenswartz and Rowe (2003). However, the diversity of people can also complement and enrich BIRD. Incorporating the creative ideas of users not only allows the digital infrastructure to evolve in perpetuity, but also keeps it open to innovation through community participation.

The development of BIRD is supervised by FernUniversität Hagen. Two research questions are addressed: 1) how people appropriate digital platforms as technologies, and 2) how social practice already shapes or will shape them in the future. Against the background of these project goals and the challenges and opportunities of diversity, the talk will have three objectives:

(1) While the educational ecosystem BIRD is still in its planning stage, one can already discern central functions of the platform. In our talk, we will look at the BIRD platform in the context of current political and scientific debates on strengths and limitations of educational platforms.

(2) As a second objective, we will address the question of how decision-makers‘ (Macgilchrist et al. 2020) practices within BIRD’s subprojects form or preform the future educational ecosystem. Here we do not focus on the technological side of it but on practices (decisions, goals, self-perceptions etc.) of all decision-makers that are involved in BIRD’s subprojects.

Part of our concern here is also the topic of future users and their ‘adoptions’ of the platform, including how they can be (or are) taken into account in the making of BIRD’s projects. Ultimately, this entails the question: how we can do research at all about future users (and their possible adoptions of the platform) and hence judge potentials or limitations of the platform and its subprojects.

(3) Actors from different educational fields will be using the BIRD ecosystem. In our presentation we will therefore address the relationship between structural conditions of the platform and practices and orientations of actors from different educational segments. Since BIRD targets all educational fields, the practices and perspectives from different segments should be reflected in the making of the platform.

Our presentation provides insights into the challenges involved in developing a national digital education ecosystem. Chief concern is to provide insights into the ‘making’ of projects that constitute BIRD; we do so by studying practices of all decision-makers involved in inventing, shaping, moulding – making – projects that will constitute a core part of the platform. In our project, we study comparatively decision-makers from different educational fields (schools, higher educational institutions, vocational training, further education). We do so based on a qualitative research design with 12 group-discussions to discern similarities and divergences between the educational segments. They are collected through group discussions and evaluated using the documentary method (Helbig et al. 2021).

The focus of the accompanying research is to explore the digital practices of the designers and the expected practices of the target groups of BIRD. Based on these findings, the connection between the digital structure of an educational ecosystem and the digital practices of the designers and users will be in focus. The overall aim of the presentation is to discuss the media pedagogical and educational conditions and possibilities that a digital educational ecosystem should fulfil in order to promote lifelong learning for as many members of society as possible, across educational sectors and age groups. According to the three stated aims of the lecture, (1) the potentials and limitations of nationally and Europe-wide available educational platforms will be discussed in order to identify central design options for practice. Different facets of educational platforms can be considered. In addition to the basic technical requirements, dimensions of a diversity-sensitive digital educational space that need to be taken into account in the design of platforms will be highlighted. (2) Furthermore, insights for research in this digital educational ecosystem will be generated, which should be useful for as many members of society as possible. (3) Finally, first empirically inspired findings will be presented and discussed, which can be linked to discourses of professional and organisational learning, e.g. with regard to the professionalisation of media pedagogy or the digital transformation of organisations, both in terms of professional theory and organisational pedagogy.

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