Meeting the challenge of emergency online learning during a pandemic – webinar reflections

The webinar - Meeting the challenge of emergency online learning during a pandemic – was conducted on 22nd October gathering the innovative educators mostly from the Eestern Partnership countries.

The webinar tackled the issues emerged with the emergency introduction of the distance learning in formal education systems as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.

The participants from all six Eastern Partnership countries have shared their practices, observations, analysis, tools and methodology that set the ground for the discussion and vies exchange during the session and in the chat. The panelists background was from different education sectors, and that provided the opportunity to learn about diverse approaches and practices.

The ETF Senior Human Capital Development Expert in Innovative Teaching and Learning Julian Stanley welcomed the participants in the Community of Innovative Educators and provided the brief overview of its goals and activities.

The keynote speaker Ljudmilla Rozhdestvenskaya - Education Technologist, Trainer and Math teacher from Estonia focused in her talk: Distant Education. steps to its effective use on evaluating drawbacks and also advantages of the distant education from the practitioner teacher perspective. Among the most challenging issues was the lack of the feedback, problems with the attentiveness, lack of trust between the teachers and “hiding” behind the avatar students, lack of systemic approach to assessment, rolling back to mostly synchronous models of lecturing.

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At the same time, the new reality forced all teachers to reinvent themselves online and to engage to the new forms of teaching and online professional development. The new networks and Communities of Practice emerged with active sharing of experiences and methodology. The presenter also discussed the new online tools or “constructors” that many teachers have mastered. The own best practices also gave floor to the new methods, e.g. online quest, master-class, webinar, educational project with full immersion, streaming, and joint creation of the media content.

In my presentation Challenges of the pandemic for education: Online Learning Zen vs Emergency Remote Teaching Routine I gave the short overview of the e-Learning development before the pandemic and the newly introduced Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) juxtaposing their modalities and approaches. E.g. careful collective planning and crafting of e-learning courses and methodology give way to the temporary quickly deployable solutions to keep educational services going.

The presenter from Georgia Ilia Mestvirishvili  - Teacher of Physics in Guivy Zaldastanishvili American Academy in Tbilisi talked about Inquiry Learning Spaces – effective tool for implementing IBL and PBL online. He offered the audience the opportunity to test the online tool based on the EU golabz eu project. The innovative approach utilized in the tool is that no ready knowledge is broadcasted by the teacher, instead, the teacher launches the investigation to certain problem and scaffolds students to the solution.

The speaker from Azerbaijan – Fidan Najafova, Head of the department Bureau on ICT for Education, Ministry of Education has presented the Virtual School platform deployed by the Ministry of Education in response to the pandemic. The platform provides different modules for lecturing, assessment, professional development, communication and also predictive analytics - it allows collecting and analysing the performance and progress data.

Presenters form Belarus - Inga Tsikhanavetskaya (BY) Primary school teacher-Methodist, school #111 Minsk, and Irina Vasilyeva (BY) - Deputy director LCC "Educational Center for Programming and High Tech", CEO ITeen Academy - offered insights to the distant education practices in non-formal education and the primary school. Their talk Distant education ≠ face-to-face articulated the importance offered an overview of the real-world practices applied in the classrooms and provided the advise for efficient use of the online instruments.

The next presenter – Irina Muntean  -methodist from Moldova Center of Excellency in Construction talked about the Methodology of teaching technical profile subjects in the period of the pandemic. The well though through approaches including blending of the synchronous and asynchronous modalities, creating the educational videos, use of animations and 3D models, continue to allow meaningful online teaching during the currently continuing online-only classes.

Finally, Lusine Fljyan (AM) Vice-Rector for Education, Research and Reforms, Northern University, Professor Doctor at the Chair of Foreign Languages and Literature, Eurasia International University offered the audience a comprehensive outlook on The Challenge of Bringing back the Students to Face-to-Face Education after COVID-19 Pandemic. By juxtaposing the advantages and disadvantages of online education the presenter provided recommendations for the Higher Education institutions including innovative the offline curricula and giving students real world experiences.

During the discussion another presenter from Moldova – Ms Diana Casu Head of the Department of the Psyshopedagogical, Social and Judicial Sciences of A. Mateevich Pedagogical College in Chisinau has talked about psycho-pedagogical aspects of the online lesson, especially outlining the fit for the Generation Z, and also presenting the SAMR model.

The webinar offered room for a genuine exchanged of ideas, and as the participants appreciated getting the informed overvies. It appeared that the problems we face are all similar, and the shared innovative approaches provide a ground for their meaningful adaptation or consideration.

The feedback was gathered through the chat and also interactive polls on Sli.do. Among the most common challenges identified was the lack of the skills, and also the insufficient infrastructure.

The webinar recording is available at: https://youtu.be/URiPg5iNzSk