Rewarding, Challenging, Educating
End of February 2020 seems like lightyears away now. We were extremely happy to have organized the second annual Finnish Education Expo Middle East in Dubai. The event was a success with an excellent program and lineup of speakers, more than 200 attendees, numerous new connections and several commitments that showed a busy spring ahead. Little did we know that it was the last week of any live education events to be arranged in the UAE for some time. Covid-19 pandemic was taking off in parts of Asia and Europe and cases had been detected in the UAE as well. We had a handful of cancellations from oversees attendees, but the scale of what was coming was not clear for anyone yet.
Then reality hit, and March was a whirlwind of setting up schools wanting to pilot Finnish EdTech platforms, training educators and getting adjusted as a team to a new way of working across continents. When school closures were announced in the UAE at the beginning of March, I got to experience firsthand how to arrange a large scale online training in a matter of days. The University of Helsinki (HY+) team put together a 3-day online training to hundreds of school leaders in Sharjah on distance learning and I was lucky to be involved in organizing that. Encouraged by the learning from that experience and a strong feeling, that the Finnish Education Expo momentum had to be continued, we decided to launch a webinar series to tackle practical pressing matters teachers and school leaders were facing.
In hindsight, it was a great decision. Our team ended up organizing four webinars between April and June with topics built to reflect new experiences and challenges educators worldwide were suddenly facing. This spring has no doubt been a spring of learning for each and every one of us, and I would like to reflect in three points on what I have learned from online webinars
Good, relevant webinars mean quite a bit of work. From choosing topics and finding available speakers who complement each others’ experience to sorting out tech. Sometimes I questioned the actual point of doing all this pro bono, but that was usually just a passing thought in times of zoom fatigue. With close to 1000 total attendance to our webinars and hundreds more watching the recordings afterwards the work was meaningful. I feel really happy that we succeeded in helping some professionals navigate through the sudden move to distance learning. I am also very thankful about the overwhelmingly positive feedback we got during the sessions and in personal messages afterwards. That keeps us going.
Online learning does work. But for this to happen, it needs to be planned well, and be built to be engaging and interactive and not too formal. Many professionals attending our webinars described their online teaching experience having been challenging, but also rewarding. This spring has been hard on teachers and principals, and especially for many children and parents. But on the positive note, this spring has also been amazingly exciting and historical time for the education sector and possibly a start of something totally new.
We are in this together. Globally. In the webinars, we always made sure to have at least a Finnish and UAE perspectives and the conclusion always was, the challenges, learnings and feelings are universal. My favorite poll in the webinars was one in which we replicated a wellbeing survey done with teachers in a school in Finland in April and the results from the webinar attendees, who were from all over the world, were very similar.
One last point I want to make: always build a word cloud with your webinar attendees. Why? Apart from looking cool, they are a great way of visualizing feedback and identifying key trends and feelings. Three words that were most common from our audience during the four sessions describing their thoughts and feelings in current times? Rewarding, challenging, educating!
