 Hi everyone, I'm Sonia Trivedi, communications manager at Moodle and today we are at Moodle Mood Global 2023. I met very interesting speakers, community members and etech enthusiasts, and today in the morning I had the pleasure to attend the session of Arakhad Jodoshelieva, Team Leader Quality Learning Ecosystems Program from UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning. Hi Arakhad, how are you doing today? Very good, thank you so much. Perfect, is it your first Moodle Mood? Yes, this is my first Moodle Mood and it is a pleasure to be here to be honest here. Welcome, very nice to see you today. Today you had a keynote speech on lifelong learning, past, present and future. Lifelong learning is really vast concept. Can you please unpack it a bit for our viewers? Starting with the definition might be nice. Okay, during my presentation I highlighted a little bit about the evolution of the concept of Lifelong Learning, which started with a 1972 report by UNESCO and it was called Learning to be. And in that Lifelong Education was considered to be one of the main master concepts to propose a different type of education systems for the societies and the historical context of the 1970s and 1980s. And if I want to highlight the concept itself, it was about how education systems should go beyond basic education and capture learning and education that's happening prior to schooling, but also while learning in different kind of spaces such as homes and workplaces and capture also adults who are not necessarily enrolled in higher education. So it was a very vast concept. The concept was supposed to support the policymakers in designing new educational systems and education system policies as well. And fast forward to today, Lifelong Learning is considered as one of the main overarching principle of organizing learning and education and training for the member states of UNESCO, but also for many other organizations and education providers. It encompasses learning throughout one's life that captures from early childhood until the elderly people's learning after their retirement as well, but also it captures learning that happens in the formal education settings, non-formal educational training programs, but also informal learning that individuals' learners are engaged in. I want to highlight also that it's about life-wide education or learning, which means that learning about different other matters or skills and developing competencies in the areas which are not necessarily just for employment. Great. Really interesting. I really enjoyed your presentation today. And you kind of answered my second question, which is more about past, present and future. How did the concept evolve over time? But you mentioned that you have researched that for quite some time, right? Well, UNESCO has been working in the area of Lifelong Education from the conceptual perspective. And since the adoption of sustainable development goals in 2015 for the next 15 years until 2030, the concept has evolved and that evolution of the concept is now reflected in the goal on education. Before it was education, the right to education was limited mostly to the basic formal education or school vocational training or higher education. In this educational goal of the SDG, it highlights the creating the opportunities for lifelong learning for all. So if I want to highlight one more matter here, it's about at the moment UNESCO is really contributing to the articulation of this concept in the policies, practices and initiatives, as well as contributing in terms of knowledge base in the area of lifelong learning. So we are currently working with member states but also the stakeholders which provide a lifelong learning opportunities for many different social groups as well as communities, starting from learning to design such policy, come up with the laws, legal frameworks for that, understanding how governance of such learning systems can actually happen and what kind of finances funding are necessary to put into it. Okay, and why is the concept important now and in the future? Well, I think during my presentation I highlighted the even when the forest report in 1972 was published, the lifelong learning as a concept was introduced to respond to the challenges of that time and also to the challenges which were about to come as well. So in the current context we have a lot of global challenges. We are living in the context of climate crisis that has an enormous impact on educational systems and learning opportunities as well. And at the same time we have other issues such as the digitization of our society, our economy as well as workplaces and educational systems. And technologies development is so fast. More advanced technologies are being adopted in the education system. For that we need to continue learning all the time because otherwise I think it will be difficult for individuals to catch up to be honest with the advancement that are happening in the world. Thirdly I think an important issue is around also the population growth on one hand but on the other hand ageing societies as well. Lifelong learning currently is also considered as one of the important concepts in which in some parts of the world when youth, children are not getting access to basic education, they have to have a second chance to learn. So member states have to actually contribute to the creation of these opportunities for those who didn't have chances at the age when they were supposed to go to schools. At the same time as I said workplaces are changing. The demands for different kind of skills are changing and that requires also learning all the time about different kind of tools and attitudes to be developed, values to be developed and competence to be developed. For the countries which has elderly or ageing population the importance of life and learning is not just for employment purposes. It's also about contributing to active ageing as well so that active healthy ageing of their population too. So in general I think it is required for many other reasons and Lifelong Learning as I said the master concept can contribute to our efforts to make learning as accessible, affordable, quality and for all. Absolutely I totally agree with you. Going back to UNESCO's work in the area you mentioned to me that you have a very interesting Lifelong Learning Initiative going on. Would you like to share more about it? We started using online platform for our capacity building efforts. During COVID time as you know that majority of us were in the lockdown and we couldn't really reach out and continue our work as business as usual. So we had to identify opportunities and tools that helps us to continue working in the area of capacity building for our member states on Lifelong Learning. So we came up with a training platform that is being tested in 2021. Very recently we launched it officially as well which helps us to continue our capacity building using digital tools and strengthening the opportunities or the creation of opportunities for those who may not necessarily have either time or means to attend the face to face training. In addition to that we are also increasing this option for multilingual training for the policy makers and the practitioners and providers because digital tools in the current context, some of these definitely allows to expand such learning opportunities. And I think our platform which is based on model as well has been tested and is being tested at the moment as well. We are organizing different kind of modalities of training starting from self-learning to community of practice to instruct alert courses which are long term and then we have also short term workshops as well. So this is one of the great examples that we actually can refer to now open access platforms such as model could contribute to outreach of the capacity of the institute such as ours in terms of meeting our goals as well as contributing to sustainable development goals in general. Great and I guess people can learn more about it on your website. Yes, if anyone is interested please I would encourage you to visit our website UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning and I just want to take this opportunity also to invite all of you to participate in our campaign which is called I am hashtag I am a lifelong learner and by telling us about why do you think you are a lifelong learner. Brilliant I'm sure people who are watching right now would be willing to participate but coming back to our interview I have a little bit more to ask you if you don't mind one important point that came to me during your presentation is the role of educators as lifelong learners. Could you please elaborate a bit more about it how is it involving. Yes educators who are mean people who contribute enormously to the process of learning as well as teaching and education. They need to become themselves as lifelong learners because of many reasons and one of the main reasons I want to highlight is that there is a technology development and the application of these technologies in education and this requires educators to be up to date about such developments and also become more critical users of tools and creative users of such tools but also creative actors they have to engage with these tools as agents active agents not passive recipients and I think educators role also is changing because of the democratization of knowledge as well before educators role was more authoritative because they had all the knowledge with themselves and the learners were expected to actually rely on their knowledge which teachers and textbooks had in the current context it is with one click the learner can access some of this information very easily so the role of the educators is changing now from having all this knowledge and supporting the having all this information at hand and providing that to the learners now becoming more facilitators of the learning process as well and at the same time I want to highlight that despite the fact that we see a lot of benefits of technologies used in education we need to be aware that educators role will remain as an important people in the process of education as well as learning why because we need to consider technology is not a silver bullet is not going to solve this problems all the problems and in addition to technology we need human interaction and educators are the ones who are going to provide such support for the learners who require such facilitation as well as help in their process of learning as well and I think last I want to highlight is that technological tools of different types should be available for teachers and of course with quality relevance as well as accessible because of the importance of these tools to support the work of the teachers rather than limit their teaching role I think we are looking at the technology as a complementary means and tools rather than the placement of the teachers from the education process Absolutely, lastly I want to ask you to take a brief look into the future and if you can share your perspective and also the vision of the institute about lifelong learning so how do you see lifelong learning moving in the next years? Well we are still, I must say we are still in the process of development of lifelong learning in concrete terms we are currently working in the area of recognition validation of accreditation of learning for example which is still at the initial stage of understanding and having some examples, concrete examples for the stakeholders to use I think lifelong learning as we promote as learning anytime, anywhere irrespective of age and social class and the languages and many other social and individual factors and being available through different modalities like formal training and non-formal education and informal learning then we need to capture all of this by developing further lifelong learning in terms of different tools, different understandings, critiques as well and also developing different versions of lifelong learning from let's say from the perspective of social benefits of lifelong learning and in terms of what I said the economics of lifelong learning financial part of the lifelong learning systems development and also from the perspective of educators as well who are those educators who are going to support such a process of lifelong in addition to that lifelong learning is happening in many places which we need to capture as well and I think these capturing is required by the researchers as well those who are providing such services and generating cases which are working well for some of the groups and testing them out and scaling it is still one of the main challenges of lifelong learning, I think Thank you very much Rakhat I learned so much from you today so thank you for your time not surprisingly lifelong learning is a theme of this conference as well so your participation was really valued I wish you all the best here at Moodo Mood and all the best with your work and thanks again Thank you so much