Combating COVID-19: Webinars

The event will be moderated by COL President and CEO, Professor Asha Kanwar. During the event participants will hear more about the ways open schooling approaches can be used to provide learning opportunities for girls unable to access schooling; will learn how open schooling can facilitate the return to formal schooling for those girls who have dropped out; will find out how governments have addressed learning loss due to school closures during the pandemic.

Panelists will draw on examples, to illustrate how they have coordinated, designed and used a variety of authentic and reliable digital assessment tasks and strategies and how students, Faculty and academic managers have responded.

The webinar on February 23 will focus on how to cost learning in the post-COVID era, discussing how to estimate the cost of school reopening, what costing tools are available and the factors to take into consideration when budgeting for education under these changing circumstances.

In a time when local and global inequalities have been exposed so dramatically, how can open educational resources and practices facilitate practical and equitable approaches to learning, teaching and assessment?  The webinar is led by Dr Catherine Cronin Strategic Education Developer, National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Dublin, Ireland.

Women’s empowerment and gender equality are central to COL’s agenda of “learning for development.” COL initiated the Commonwealth Wise Women (CWW) mentoring project to empower women and girls to achieve their leadership potential and to influence the next generation of leaders.

The webinar will focus on the delivery and effectiveness of hybrid and remote learning modalities and intends to share experiences from countries grappling with decisions to open or close their school systems. The event will not only discuss issues related to inclusion and effectiveness but will also address how hybrid approaches can be best implemented.

In this webinar, there is a presentation of a new initiative of MIT BLOSSOMS (https://blossoms.mit.edu) that provides a complete scaffolding for the novice teacher who has no or limited experience with project-based learning (PBL).

Panelists of the webinar: Dr Leigh-Anne Perryman, Senior lecturer at the Open University’s (UK) Institute of Technology, Ms Vilma Gregory, multimedia expert and communications consultant. Experts invite participants to discuss cyberviolence, its prevalence and impact, and suggest measures and practices for preventing and protecting against it.

As part of the global education response to the COVID-19 pandemic, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank have conducted a survey on National Education Responses to COVID-19 School Closures. In this webinar, the results from these two rounds of data collection will be showcased, sharing the lessons learnt from government responses.

Globally, women are less likely to access skills development and to find a job. Women face gender biases in occupational choices; barriers to education and training. COL is bringing together three women to briefly present global, institutional, and individual perspectives and offer innovative solutions.

The Forum on Child Online Protection for CIS Region, co-organized by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and UNESCO IITE, aims to contribute wider presentation to the CIS Region and discussion with ITU Members of new Guidelines on Child Online Protection (COP) for policy makers, industry, parents and educators, as well as for children.

The joint UNICEF-UNESCO-World Bank webinar series is organized around the Framework for reopening of schools and its latest Supplement, as part of the Global Education Coalition on COVID-19 efforts to support governments in strengthening distance learning and facilitating the reopening of schools. The seventh webinar will focus on reopening schools in developing countries, taking a closer look at the challenges and diverse responses of governments in addressing the issues.