SELFIE HACKATHON in UKRAINE: Could SELFIE and a Hackathon Match?

If you read this blog, most probably  you are already familiar with SELFIE, a self reflection tool designed to support schools to develop their digital strategy.  SELFIE use has risen exponentially lately and hopefully it will keep inspiring more new countries to improve their school digitalization processes.  For more info on SELFIE, SELFIE | Open Space (europa.eu)

I am sure, many of you have heard of or even have participated at different hackathons.  But probably, not many of you have heard of or participated at a “SELFIE Hackathon”.  In Ukraine we did run the first ever SELFIE hackathon and in this blog I would like to share our “SELFIE Hackathon” experience.  BTW, it’s my first blog at EU Open Space ever.

But let me first provide you some background info on how SELFIE project started in Ukraine.

Do you believe in wonders or good luck?  I used not to, but I do now.  Here’s why. 

Since June 2018 I have been leading the team of the ICT Committee at the Ministry of Education and Science in Ukraine.  In April 2020,  Natalia Morze, one of our committee members, introduced SELFIE to our team.  We were all very excited with the functionalities and the potential of the tool.  As the Head of the Committee, I started looking for ways to  launch SELFIE project in Ukraine. Thus, I sent the initial e-mail request to ETF and, what a wonder!  It happened that that very week,  the ETF managers also initiated the communication and sent an official proposal to the Ministry of Education and Science in Ukraine to consider the launch of SELFIE project in Ukraine.  Wasn’t that a wonder?!  At this point I have to say that for some reason my letter had reached the addressee faster than the official letter from ETF to MoE, thus, we started communication from our side and figured out that  both sides had a strong interest to launch SELFIE in Ukraine. COOL!

In July 2020,  I presented the idea of launching the SELFIE  project in Ukraine to the newly appointed Chief Digital Transformation Officer (CDTO) at MoE.  Finally, after some negotiations, clarification questions and answers,  we set up a SELFIE project team  involving professionals and enthusiastic colleagues. The project preparation started. The launching of The SELFIE pilot in Ukraine took place in April 2021 and  in several weeks it was successfully completed.

The final report of the SELFIE pilot  with all the project details  and outcomes will be made available in Open Space in the coming months, stay tuned! SELFIE in Ukraine | Open Space (europa.eu)

The interest in SELFIE in Ukraine was so high that the total number of selected schools for the pilot was 90! (60 K12 schools and 30 VET schools from 10 regions) and we ended up with  almost 20 thousand SELFIE pilot participants.  In Ukraine we do have over 14 thousand schools, over 438 thousand school teachers and almost  4 million students.  So we believed that 90  pilot schools was not a big number but still quite enough to have the valid results for pilot analysis!  Though, a bit challenging for the pilot! Right?

Need to say, that with highly professional leadership support from ETF and JRC teams, due to fruitful partnership between the Ministry of Education and Science in Ukraine and the Ministry of Digital Transformation, due to the collaborative efforts of the national SELFIE team members we managed the pilot to be a great success. My great and sincere thanks to everyone engaged in the process. We did it!  

After the SELFIE exercise was completed, all the school leaders and SELFIE school coordinators were all very excited expecting the final SELFIE school reports.  Probably all of you remember this impatience to get SELFIE results. The same was in Ukraine.

As the National SELFIE Expert by that time, I was wondering what would be the best way to get maximum out of SELFIE reports to really speed up and qualitatively improve the school digitalization process in all 8 SELFIE focus areas.  So, I was a bit puzzled, after the first excitement of the participants was gone, most of the piloting school leaders were not that enthusiastic to make any urgent steps to change anything in their schools.  After some feedback analysis I clarified that there were several reasons for that.

• Firstly, it was the end of the school year, when most of the school leaders are focusing on dozens of other important things in the end of the school year. ( Aha! Never plan to take SELFIE exactly at  the end of the school year;)  That’s why the highly awaited interactive, informative and detailed SELFIE reports had to wait, as they required more mental space and time for deeper analysis and , what is even more important, for school leaders to think on the next steps.
• Secondly, it was a challenge for most of the school leaders to make the link from SELFIE school report and analysis to real action and furthermore, to collaboratively construct their development plan based on the SELFIE report .
• Thirdly, there’s no or very limited leadership experience regarding strategic digitalization analysis and planning on the school level.

While discussing the above challenges and the pilot next steps with SELFIE teams from ETF, JRC and Ukraine, Alessandro Brolpito, the senior specialist on digital skills and learning at ETF, came up with the idea to run a hackathon, aiming to support the problem solving process for piloting schools and guide the development of the action plans development . A great and innovative idea for SELFIE project!  Isn’t it?  And we all didn’t want to lose the momentum after the pilot.

To make it happen and to set the floor, we had to investigate everything we could find about hackathons, their rules, specifics of online hackathons ( as due to the Covid-19 pandemic we were not able to gather the hackathon participants in one place).

But Covid-19 was not the only challenge!  There were more to follow:

• a big number of schools wishing to participate. There were 60 schools which applied to participate in the hackathon. 
• a large number of event participants. The idea was to engage SELFIE pilot school teams, not just some representatives.  A team could consist of +/-10 people: up to 2-3 schools leads, a school coordinator, 3-5 innovative teachers and minimum 3 student leads from each school.  Means 600+ participants in total.  Wasn’t  it a  new challenge?!
• an online event vs a face-to-face one;
• no criteria to split participants by groups to enable productive problem solving, collaboratively looking for the ways out to overcome gaps and challenges highlighted at SELFIE school reports;
• schools from general and VET systems to work and solve problems together;
• no on-line event tech. support, as we used to have from ETF professional team at SELFIE kick off meeting in April;
• no ready solution on how to make the hackathon productive, engaging and entertaining at the same time, etc. etc.

Many in our place might say – No way!  But not usJ  Personally I like challenges, as they exist to be solved. Right?  So, we decided to take a hackathon approach to overcome those challenges. A hackathon inside a hackathon!

To make it work, we did our substantial preparatory work.  We decided to let school teams, work together at their own schools while participating in the on-line hackathon.  A kind of a blended approach. Before the hackathon we had initiated a short questionary to identify piloting schools top digitalization priorities they wanted to work on and improve, something really crucial and meaningful for the school to be solved.  Their answers helped schools to start thinking on their own priorities and for us to get the criteria and split all the participants by groups according to their key interests.  The idea behind that was to let different schools solve the same problem (meaningful for them) in internal and external groups, to empower each other and exchange the solutions and key findings with others.  We set the rules for team work and had pre-trained the hackathon group moderators on problem solving, online group work, join work in shared docs, exchanging and capturing the ideas, etc. to enable a kind of the guided problem-solving approach.

In the end of the day, it was such an exciting and productive event.  There was time during the hackathon when school teams worked collaboratively together (teachers and students and school heads) in their internal groups, some time for them to investigate other schools team findings, some time to exchange ideas in bigger external groups.  We also had a team of observers, some experts who could randomly join different online groups to observe and/or add value w/ some ideas to increase the efficiency and productivity of the group work, and many more know-hows and tips.

It’s a wonderful case of synergy and proactive approach!  Great thanks to all colleagues from the different stakeholders involved for their support but the core drivers for change in this process were surely all the Hackathon participants who really want to change the digitalization of their schools to achieve greater educational outcomes in the digital world.

In conclusion – the answer to my initial question in this blog is “YES”!  SELFIE and Hackathon match very well.  They are both innovative, the hackathon approach empowers, speeds up and increases SELFIE outcomes to be bridged w/ real strategic action planning.  Almost all we planned worked well and we managed to reach the set-up goals.  SELFIE hackathon feedback from the participants was highly positive.

There are a lot of new insights, ideas and lessons learnt that could be discussed further. We are also thinking about creating a SELFIE Hackathon Guidebook and I’m looking forward to your comments and to exchange more on the Ukrainian and your own experiences.

Tatiana Nanaieva

SELFIE Ukraine National Expert