 Thanks for allowing us to introduce the Ocean Teacher Global Academy of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. So we call it OTGA in short, it's a long term project of IOC of UNESCO and its second phase started in 2020 precisely when COVID, the COVID pandemic hit. The project builds on the legacy of previous projects and includes new initiatives such as the UN agenda 2030 and its SDGs and also the UN decade for ocean sciences for sustainable development. The main goals of the Ocean Teacher Global Academy is to deliver packaged courses that address the needs of the IOC member states and its partners and the training courses for continuous professional development and include topics such as marine spatial planning, implementing international marine law, preparedness for natural disasters like tsunamis and so on. However, this was not the case for many, many years and in fact the history behind goes back to the 1980s when training courses were organized very much ad hoc mainly in African countries and an important milestone was reached in 2005 when the project office for IOD of IOC was established in Ostend in Belgium and this function, this place functioned as the single international training center for many years. So everyone would travel to Ostend to attend a training course that was normally five days long, 30 hours workload and would be able to train around 20 people per course. Of course this model worked for some time but it became a little bit obsolete soon and in 2015 we moved into what we call now the Ocean Teacher Global Academy with the establishment of training centers around the world ranging from Asia to Latin America and Africa. We were already using Moodle but in a very, very rudimentary way. We were just trying to sell the idea of using a learning management system and then in 2020, we expanded to 16 training centers but as you all know 2020 brought lots of surprises and the world froze for a while and so we had to really reinvent our approach to continue providing training for our community and this is where we were extremely happy to already having some experience with using the Moodle platform and since then our Moodle platform became the backbone of Ocean Teacher and we've been providing training courses strictly online since 2020 as mainly instructor-led online courses being organized from the regional training centers. Now of course that moving to fully online learning brings many challenges as you probably are aware and to start with we realized how big the misunderstanding is of what you're learning is and most of our training centers and the instructors there just wanted to transfer directly what they were doing in the classroom and basically streaming their classes. We've been trying to demystify this idea since then and in this process we've come with many challenges and I think perhaps the very first one is the low digital literacy. We've had a very interesting talk just before the keynote talk talking about digital skills and digital literacy and I was a bit struggling in the sense that it was indeed very European focused and we're working with African countries with Asian countries. It's a completely different story with small island developing states as well but in a nutshell we have three levels of challenges at the learner level. We've had way more people enrolling to our courses and we got lots of attention however the engagement is much lower and the commitment is much lower so of course there's lots of well a considerable dropout rate of the learners. As I mentioned the instructors started directly transferring them the what they were used to do during the in the classroom but of course this doesn't work so it took us lots of coaching of the our instructors to start moving from from that and of course they were also a little bit they overestimated themselves regarding how much they were able to use a learning management system. There's a learning curve there as well and of course technical issues with the the spread of our training centers time zones are a gigantic puzzle for us. We've installed big blue button which we're a fan of but there's lots of problems with that especially firewalls we have lots of complaints about that. So we started trying to tackle some of these issues. We actually brought an e-learning designer to our team and and we we did a needs analysis so we asked our instructors at our training centers what they were able to do already based on this study examining faculty perception of their readiness to teach online and the results were quite surprising because as I mentioned before they definitely overestimated their capabilities their skills because we contrasted this with the the contents the training courses that were uploaded on the platform. So this was definitely not so okay and for to trying to address this we've we've created our own course on designing and teaching online courses for our own instructors and using their own courses as mini projects that they would be as assignments that they would have to do during the discourse. This course takes more or less 15 hours to to follow. We've also developed tutorials and specifically focusing on using the lesson tool in Moodle because we definitely like it very much and I see you very nodding and and also make sure that we have one to one coaching sessions with each training center's instructors and then we've also developed a course template because they were quite closed and and the the courses were looking really not so good so we've developed a well-structured course template that includes all the placeholders that we believe are absolutely mandatory in a course and these have been translated in the meantime also to Spanish and Portuguese. Our main language is English but we also work with them with other languages and then to address the learner's needs we also created a standard start year section in each course where we have again placeholders of everything that should go in there. I must admit and my colleague is also here so she will be smiling it's incredible how adult learners don't read and don't want to follow instructions so this is a mandatory section and everything else is not enabled in the course as long as they don't complete reading this section but they insist in not trying to read and send us emails saying I can't see the course contents well of course not and then of course we've had to reformat all the structure of our courses and what used to be a one week long on-site course is now at least three sometimes up to six weeks long training course with with a few hours per week of individual assignments and eventually some live or synchronous sessions used for Q&A with the instructors so those are mainly our our approaches to help them complete the courses we also have to have lots of care regarding accessibility so we actually do not promote the use of videos that much because that's very heavy in developing countries and we try to promote not using linking to platforms that are not available in some member states. YouTube is very nice but it's not available in every single member state that's an example and then to complete it we've also implemented a quality matters rubric that is adaptive from an already existing one and parallel to that we are also ISO certified as a as a learner provider outside formal education so as you can see from these graphs this has been an uphill story and you can see that in 2015-16 when we started with the ocean teacher global academy and the regional training centers we started being able to train a lot more people in the different regions and of course we were impacted by covid but in 2021 we managed to train way more people than ever before and so we really believe that going online was a fantastic move and promoted by covid so not everything is bad about covid and another good side effect of this is that this was achieved with a much lower carbon footprint which is also quite important we've also managed to reach areas or audiences that we it was very difficult to to reach such as small island developing states in the in the pacific and we also have some building evidence that we managed to train more women online that if it would have been a non-site training course so one one of the challenges identified by the UN ocean decade that started last year is ensuring that skills data and technology are accessible for all and this can only be achieved by the right training and we believe that through ocean teacher we are contributing to that however we do see that like a lot of our training is very much hands-on so practice-based training and we see that there's lots of resistance to this change to moving online and this is perhaps our main challenge convincing our audiences that online is also a way of of getting things done and so we'll be continuing trying to convince our communities that we will be using this further and further and I often mention astronauts are trained on earth so we should be able to train ocean sciences or researchers also online and I would not like to finish by mentioning the the king dow declaration from UNESCO in from 2015 where which which became the very first global declaration promoting the use of ICTs in education and and I would like to also have you promoting this and and using this declaration to to promote ICTs as a way of promoting inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning education thank you very much and there's one minute left thank you very much Claudia that was excellent we have time for one question if we have a question from the audience I actually have one thing I'd like to ask are you using the mobile app to ensure accessibility for people in places without bandwidth yet not yet okay not yet but we're considering it and by the way we've had lots of help from our Moodle partner in redoing our platform the last couple of years