 Good afternoon everyone to this School Education Gateway online event about implementing impactful and scalable online teacher professional development. My name is Benjamin Hertz and I'm pedagogical manager of the Teacher Academy on the School Education Gateway. We have quite a full program this afternoon covering two panels and a conversation with a Teacher Academy pilot teacher. So I want to jump right to the welcoming speech and it is a great honour to welcome to this event Mrs. Themis Christofito, Director General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture at the European Commission. So without further ado, Mrs. Christofito over to you. Good afternoon. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this online event focusing on the possibilities of online professional development. I cannot by start by commenting the incredible efforts made by all education stakeholders especially teachers throughout 2020. The sudden change to online education and training was far from simple. You have shown great resilience and determination. In the recent months restrictions on travel and physical meetings and the increase in teachers workload have often compromised professional development of educators. It was therefore very important that the School Education Gateway has been fully operational providing teachers with support and development opportunities in these unprecedented circumstances. Now what more can the whole education sector do than to adapt? Online and distance learning is not a new phenomenon in other learning. Still, learning is a social experience. We cannot ignore human desire to be in a shared space, to observe practice first hand and to collaborate closely and spontaneously with fellow professionals. We need to implement blended mobility of professionals in such a way that new learning formats can enrich the traditional, traditional inverted commas learning experience. I think we all agree that E-tweening has truly made ground in fostering online teacher professional development. The E-tweening platform has never stood still and this year had to further adapt its own approach with a fully online conference. The School Education Gateway Teacher Academy has been offering massive open online courses for over four years now. It has developed its own pioneering model. It does not merely invite individuals to test themselves with online materials, but in a truly European collaborative spirit it encourages professional dialogue and peer reviewing of school strategies and of learning plans. I am pleased to formally launch today the research report that investigates the impact of these courses on European teacher practice and professional identity. We will use these findings to further improve the offer of courses. I also invite you, policymakers and teacher educators to be part of this movement, to look together to the future of education. Apart from what we can offer, recognition is highly important. We need to make sure that teachers' time and efforts devoted to professional development are indeed recognized in a formal way. So what practical steps can we take at national and European levels to achieve this? In the communication on achieving the European Education Area by 2025, we stated our full commitment to supporting teachers and school leaders' careers, to making them attractive and sustainable professions. This includes guidance for national career frameworks and support for increasing the number and quality of teacher learning mobility. We also plan to support the creation of networks of teacher education institutions. These Erasmus teacher academies will be launched with the first call for proposals under the future Erasmus program early next year. We will discuss with existing institutions and teacher associations how to develop this initiative. I also believe that the online teacher academy on the School Education Gateway should be fully integrated in projects building the new Erasmus teacher academies. We have remained in close dialogue with European ministries of education throughout 2020 in order to support their decision making and the exchange of good practices. Other main concerns include the need for teachers to receive professional development on specific topics. Here, we are not just talking about online courses, but other forms of online professional development, project team spaces, the ability to access articles and videos on the latest developments and webinars. We know that hundreds of European teachers already make use of the learning opportunities available on the School Education Gateway each month, and we are extremely interested in hearing how these opportunities impact on their teacher practice. I am sure that we will hear fruitful discussions today and I invite the audience to also share their questions and their views. We will continue our discussions online tomorrow at the European Education Summit where I do hope you will be able to join us. For now, I thank you and I wish you all the best for the rest of this challenging year and beyond. Thank you for your attention. Many thanks for those introductory words, Mrs. Christofito, and I thank you for really captured the essence of what we want to talk about today at this event and that is really that design challenge related to online professional development. Now, of course, online professional development and online learning has been around for a long time, but because of the current situation with COVID-19, we have seen a substantial shift towards more online professional development being available to teachers. The question is, will that shift be sustained as we move into a post-COVID world, hopefully very soon? And also, if that shift will entail a high quality of online professional development available to teachers. We know that currently there is a lot of continuation of face-to-face pedagogies in online professional development and online learning and we know that doesn't necessarily work very well. So we need to make sure that as we move into the post-COVID world with more online professional development in place, that we really utilise the opportunities and benefits that the online environment offers us. And this is what I really want to talk about today with our panellists in the two panel sessions and with the Teacher Academy pilot teacher. But before doing that, I want to say a few more words about the Online Teacher Academy of the School Education Gateway, which Mrs. Christofito introduced already, and also the report that was launched today, which is available on the event website for you to access as of right now. So the Teacher Academy is an initiative of the European Commission launched back in 2016, where we offer MOOCs for teachers. We have since 2016 offered 31 MOOCs with over 50,000 enrolments and the work of these courses has been supported, has been developed with the support of a pedagogical advisory board. And this pedagogical advisory board is really behind the organisation of this event today, and many of the members of this board will be part of the panel discussions in a moment. One of the reasons why we want to talk, why I want to introduce you quickly to this initiative is because we feel that the way, the format we have used in the online professional development that we offer on the Teacher Academy is part, can be part of the answer to the overarching question we are addressing today. Because we have implemented a pedagogical design of our courses that focuses on teacher collaboration, on teacher peer exchange, and where we have some evidence to suggest that that is highly impactful and offers an opportunity for sustained change in teachers' practices. Let me say a few more words about that. I want to have time to go into detail, but I want to give you at least some specific examples. What you can see here on this slide are the six principles of our instructional design. The first principle that is really at the core of what we do is about facilitating peer exchange. The MOOCs that we organise are really built around the principle of getting teachers together and getting them to talk to each other. This is far from a setup where there is a central instructor, one expert who transmits information and content to an audience. The idea with the courses that we organise is primarily about getting teachers together to give each other feedback, share resources, share ideas, etc. That means in regards to the design of what we do, that content, while important, is in a way secondary. Its main purpose is not the transmission of information or knowledge, but the triggering of exchanges between peers. So you can see here on this slide a typical example where we have a short video interview with an expert, a teacher or even some students, and then a padlet where there is a reflection or an exchange exercise. Another really key step of the design that we implement in our courses is facilitating transfer to practice. While theory is of course important, it's not the primary focus of what we do on our courses. We try to focus on practical considerations, practical problems that teachers face in their everyday work in the classroom. And part of that means that we want to give into the hands of the teachers something that when they leave the course they can use right away in their classroom. So part of the course process is the production of a course output, usually in the form of a lesson plan. And to encourage the use of that lesson plan, to encourage a high quality production of lesson plans as well as recognition, we also publish some of those after every course on the school education gateway. Now does this work? Well we have evidence to suggest it does. The research report that Mrs. Christofito mentioned a moment ago, which was launched today, provides us with evidence gathered by an external research consultancy and covering data from participants of our courses who have finished the course quite recently, but also at least a year after completion. So it gives us a fairly good picture of the kind of impact that the courses achieve. Of course this is feedback we get from the teachers themselves, so it's their own perceived impact, but nevertheless it gives us a strong indication. And as you can see here in this graph that 85% of teachers report that participation in a course results in at least some kind of change. And more importantly, 60% of the participants indicate that this is a long-term change. So they have made permanent changes to their practice. Now bearing in mind that these courses don't require a substantial amount of investment and time of the teachers, I think these are quite notable results. And furthermore if you look at how they make use of these resources and of the instructional design that we introduced in our courses, there is a clear indication from the evidence we have that this does seem to work with almost 90% making use of the lesson plans or other form of course product that they produce in our courses, actually turning that into practice in their classroom, and equally 73% using the resources shared by other teachers. So validating the kind of approach which is about peer exchange that we use on the teacher academy. Now of course this is just one example of how you can organize online professional development. We feel it offers some answers or it supports some of the answers when addressing the question that we want to talk about today. The work of the teacher academy is as mentioned already supported by a pedagogical advisory board. Three of which members are part of the panel that I want to talk about, who I want to talk about this key question about how we can design effective online professional development for teachers. So unfortunately we have to report that our colleague Anne Gilleran who is a senior advisor and pedagogical manager for the E-20 central support service cannot join us today due to a family emergency. But I believe we have many participants also from the E-20 community with us here, so feel free to add your contributions and ideas into the chat as we move into the panel discussion. So I'd like to take the opportunity to welcome the other three members of our first panel today. Daniela Tasic Hansen is a consultant in e-learning pedagogy and a project manager at the National Danish Knowledge Center of e-learning who also run professional development for teachers. Dana Lorelard is professor of learning with digital technologies at the Knowledge Lab of the University College London Institute of Education and Madeline Murray is national coordinator for CPD design with PDST technology and education part of the Irish Ministry of Education's National Professional Development Service for teachers. A warm welcome to the three of you. This is the question that we want to address in our panel today, how do we design effective online professional development that meets the needs of teachers and other school staff. So the first question I want to direct to Madeline, Madeline can you tell us a bit more about the situation in Ireland? How has COVID-19 impacted teacher professional development in Ireland and where do you see the opportunities and challenges of this new situation? Sure and good afternoon everybody. So in Ireland I suppose speaking on behalf of the PDST which is the national provider for support services for teachers at first and second level, what we have seen I suppose we saw initially a move online for all of our services so we would have been already providing online courses and resources and as well as webinars so we looked at moving everything online including the support that was previously provided by our advisors in Irish schools so they moved to an online platform also. We designed of course specifically on teaching online and then we ran several live webinars as well for teachers during that time. So there was quite a shift in terms of how we offered support to schools during the time of school closures and since the take up I suppose has been extremely high we've reached a new audience in some cases for our digital technologies courses in particular where teachers who may have previously not engaged so much with digital technologies there was a need there that was met by the online courses in that area. We also focused on curating resources on our Skullnet portal for teachers so curating high quality teaching and learning resources so the teachers would have ready access to these. Another factor which came up during that time was when teachers were teaching remotely issues around internet safety and these were handled by our web-wise initiative and guidance produced on social media platforms and also on how to teach safely and effectively in an online environment. I suppose since that time we have seen that there has been a change in the way we engage with teachers but teachers sharing looking outward a lot more teachers sharing their practice with each other and the online space providing them the opportunity to do that so there's been a lot of sharing of practice there's been a lot of sharing resources. Twitter has become a very popular platform for teachers in Ireland and there's a hashtag edshareie which became hugely popular during school closures but that has continued to be the case so that has been a real positive development during this time. In terms of challenges I suppose one of the challenges we are seeing now is that many of our teachers are very tired teaching in this environment where students are socially distanced and wearing masks and trying to teach in those contexts is quite difficult so it's finding a balance to where we can support teachers in that way and I suppose one of the casualties as well is that it is a little bit difficult to teach in constructivist and collaborative ways when students are socially distanced so that would be a focus of our work at the moment and would be supporting teachers in that area I think an opportunity for us would be to look at the services we are now providing fully online and even though schools have been back in their classrooms in September we're continuing to provide all of our services online so I think it's looking at how we provide a framework of CPD to schools in a blended way and harness what we've already done in terms of providing more offerings online and providing a framework of CPD to schools. Many thanks Madeline that sounds like you've done a ton of things there and let's hope we keep those as we move forward into the post-COVID world. I'm curious Daniela is it the similar situation in Denmark? Do you also see this kind of fatigue of the teachers now with online professional development or the online spirit in general? Yes hi everyone yes it's I think we have the same picture in Denmark the teachers have been working very hard very hard and now I think there's not only of online teaching but the situation in general people are a bit tired but I have to say I also see some teachers I recognize the sharing of practice some teachers that are looking at how can I use what I've learned in the past period in my future teaching so that's that's a positive in regard of teacher training organizations I think a lot of teacher trainers have had a very difficult time because of the situation not being able to meet face to face on site so they've had to make online courses or blended learning courses and it's challenging and it's very time consuming so a lot of pressure I will say I see some potential too because now we have a lot of experiences and we have the possibility to reflect upon what works virtually what works really well when we meet and use it when hopefully soon we we have a vaccination in all countries and can have a more regular life in general and we my organization we work with training teachers in IT and pedagogy what we noticed is that not everyone but in general the teachers we meet and its online courses now they come with more basic skills so we can head to talking about pedagogy a bit faster than before and that's a positive also that maybe perhaps not in general but some of the teachers have more basic skills digital skills I think everyone have to do the best even though we're tired to take the good experiences too and think about how could this potentially qualify teacher training because I believe it can if we use the possibility of reflection and always have an access to school when you're inspired the first day evening that's where you enter your learning environment gives a flexibility too for working for people in jobs and then think about where do I really want to use for example establishing relations in onsite training so I think and of course there's we're doing it right now we have the possibility to meet across borders so we we get cultural insight we can connect with teachers from other countries so I think it's important that we really though we're tired think about how do we use this the best possible way many thanks daniella and as we address that question that daniella was raising what do we know from the academic literature what do we know from research about effective teacher professional development and online and how how to move that online daniella you work in academia can you maybe quickly outline to us what the academic literature tells us in this regard well I think there's a huge academic literature of course on tpd teacher professional development I use that term which has been going on for years and we know very well that it's good at giving advice and guidance to teachers and communicating findings from research and solutions to problems and reflection on that and so on and of course we can take a lot of those lessons into online tpd but there are some extremely different opportunities which are peculiar to being online which are much more difficult to do in a face-to-face context for example it seems that teachers are able to become more active learners because it's asynchronous so they become active discussants in the forums and active designers of the kinds of things that you were describing earlier ban about the way in which they create learning designs or lesson plans or something like that which are then stored and shared with other teachers so that they're helping to develop a kind of knowledge base about what we know about how to teach online or even if it's something quite separate from teaching online it's about problem solving or something like that so the opportunity for these asynchronous forums means that we're developing learning communities and what we've seen is how much teachers love to pitch into a discussion they can have their say they can take as long as they like to compose their comment because it's asynchronous they're not worried about the language problems so much and they can read and react to comments from others and even help solve each other's problems sometimes teachers seem to be a community which are really good at acting as a community and then of course we have the peer review process and we've seen how valuable this is to teachers and how good they are at sharing their ideas and reflections and commenting on what other what their peers are doing as well and that process of peer review then helps to cultivate this kind of shared sense of what the community is learning together about whatever the particular teaching problems is and of what counts as high quality online learning in particular so it's building a kind of it's a sense of a a common community approach to digital pedagogies and then another aspect I think is quite it is proving to be quite important is that MOOCs go beyond the usual certificate of attendance which is common to professional development because it requires a bit more of participants so the teaching academy courses for example typically finish by asking participants to submit a final product like a lesson plan or something and then some of those which are particularly good and get high peer review scores are then selected to be published on the school education gateway now that's really important because it means that the whole process is now enabling teachers to act rather like the academic community where you build on each other's ideas it's no longer no longer a sort of private individual activity just you and yourself with maybe a few of your colleagues in the school but you're doing peer review of innovations you're sharing them with the community publishing them making them available for further development by other people so this is this is an incredibly important aspect of what we can do with online methods now of course some of this is is quite challenging because you don't reach everybody and I think one of our greatest challenges with this has been to reach the teachers who are not online who are even a bit suspicious of online and so that's one of the areas where we try to encourage those who are there with us in the online space to set up their own study groups and do some research on that and the the teaching academy has done some excellent work on that which I think is going to be published soon but those lessons we're learning are extremely important for the future of the way in which tpt develops I think. Thanks Dan I think you've touched on a whole range of issues which we want to pick up in a moment again but I want to focus a bit more on this community aspect and bring teachers together and talking to each other and you suggest yes teachers are very active and very good at the community thing but it's also up to the teacher educated to design that quite purposefully and meaningfully so I wonder Madeline from your experience can you maybe elaborate a bit on how we can ensure that teachers collaborate and exchange in a meaningful way as part of online CPD and maybe you can also elaborate a bit further on the other point that Deanna highlighted that transfer to practice how do you do that in your practice in Ireland Madeline unfortunately you're you are muted apologies and yeah how we design the courses is extremely important to facilitate that collaboration and I know the teacher academy does a very good job in that in that regard and it's very very important to provide to provide the opportunity for teachers to actually discuss openly and share practice and for them to feel that they're in a very supportive environment and that they're you know that to give them the opportunity to help each other out but also to not to be embarrassed to pose difficult questions and pose questions about you know how they use resources in their classrooms or how they can change their pedagogies and all of that and I think the teacher academy does that very well we in Ireland we we try and provide those opportunities as well on our online courses where we would in you know invite teachers to reflect on their practice and and discuss and exchange ideas it kind of links in with the whole transfer to practice in that having authentic opportunities or authentic activities in a course and designing digital resources are are really important design factors in a course that teachers actually come away from the course with a resource that they can use in their own classroom and and what we what we see that it works well both in you know in in online MOOCs such as the teacher academy and in our own online courses is where you give teachers time to actually try something in their classroom and then come back and say how they got on what worked well what challenges if any did they experience and and there and we're certainly seeing it in Ireland where the you know the the exchanges of practice are really open and honest and teachers are fantastic at helping each other out and but it's all it's all about providing that forum to them and giving them a you know an incentive if you like to come back and and share their experiences because it can be so valuable in terms of of their own practice to be able to do something in their classroom and come back and share how they got on I would say in many ways the online space enables that as you know Diana was saying more so than in the face to face where traditionally you might have a one day or a two day event and and then it's over and the teacher goes back to their classroom and I know with the best will in the world it's sometimes very difficult to remember what you did in the course and let alone to try something out in your classroom because you have all the other pressures but actually in the online space you have such flexibility you can have an a one hour module every week you can have space in between for teachers to try things out and come back and I I think our experience and I I know on the teacher academy as well having things spaced over a number of weeks in in an online environment certainly allows you that flexibility for transfer to practice and meaningful engagement which is really where where all the really strong learning happens online great many thanks Madeleine I want to come back now to another point raised already by Diana and that's really the engagement of those who are more skeptical or who maybe lack digital competence and I see here in the chat someone mentioning that people are getting a little bit fed up with online Daniela can you can you maybe say a few words about that how can we engage teachers who are more reluctant to join an online training online course or whatever the format that might be any experience that you have in that regard well I have 10 years of experience with with that actually but I think it's a hard question to answer first and foremost I have to say maybe we should stop considering CPD as something for only one teacher I think Madeleine and Diana said it very well we have to encourage to collaboration encourage for teachers for the from the same institution to participate together and in an ideal world the management the school leader everyone is involved at home talking about how do we try the things you learned how do we implement it into practice and so on and one more point is we have to think about how we we talk about not having the digital skills needed it should not be something that's embarrassing or shameful we have to talk about it in a constructive way and address it and that's also a job both at home but it's definitely us a job as someone providing teacher training so that's a perspective to have how do we meet the teachers that might be skeptical because they lack digital skills so that's one thing the other thing is we have to provide high quality online courses I think you mentioned the teacher academy all the work put into thinking about individual reflection collaboration how they have a learning diary and a concrete product they can try out at home everything that makes it high quality and it sounds simple but it for teacher training providers it it's necessary to take the time discuss the learning approaches you want to have and play in your online course discuss the pedagogy the designs and use the time needed to provide a good online course and hopefully and I think most likely it will be a mix you will have online courses you will have blended learning courses you will have unsigned courses when it's needed but we all really have to think about when we talk online courses the high quality and so when you've presented with an online course as a teacher it's not second best compared to meeting on on site it's actually just as good and maybe depending on subject matter and the content even better so two answers to to one question perhaps a big responsibility for teacher training providers to make high quality online courses that are more than a text a video and a quiz and we have to talk constructively about and and find ways to meet teachers that might elect digital skills yeah many thanks Daniela and I think really the the key thing that you mentioned there is also depending on the situation depending on the subject matter so really making sure that we utilize that plethora of different formats online on site blended whatever else it might be to ensure the quality for what we're trying to achieve and that's something we're going to pick up in a moment again and I see a couple of points in the chat also to that effect but I now want to come back to you Diana and really raise a question that's relevant in particular for the policymaker audience here today and that is what can policymakers do to support teacher educators to develop more diverse and accessible cvd formats online that nevertheless maintain a high quality what is needed to achieve that well I think the first thing I'd say is a very simple three word exhortation I suppose which is trust the teachers and when you think about everything we've all been saying already in this meeting about how fantastically the teaching community has responded to this extraordinary unheard of emergency that we've had this year they have been incredibly inventive and they've done it with very very little help from the professionals you know from education departments in universities for example have not come up and stepped up to this challenge to help them at all they've done it pretty much by themselves so I think there has been a history of teacher professional development which is a bit like doing it to the teachers and we have to reverse that completely it's doing it with the teachers a form of collaboration so don't expect that anybody can tell them what to do it's much more a process of orchestrating the way that they can work together collaboratively as a kind of academic community to discover the new knowledge that we now need so supporting more of the kinds of asynchronous online formats which teacher teacher academy has pioneered and then using these to orchestrate that collection of ideas and discoveries from teachers which then enables them to build this new knowledge of how we all do online learning and Ben showed some examples of that and we can use those same online courses then to support them in doing the action research and the peer review that builds validated knowledge so that's a big shift in the way we think about planning teacher professional development in this area where is the knowledge of this where is it other than what are the teachers themselves who are learning every day in the classroom and in the online context as well how to do this that's where the knowledge is developing now it needs to be shared so they need to be turned into a different kind of teaching profession that can work in this much more collaborative way so let's recognize that by creating this much more collaborative and productive constructivist form of teacher professional development Many thanks Diana I think that's a very powerful message and you're a trust the teacher's comment is appreciated also very highly by many participants in the chat and I think that's a very nice way to close at least the first part of this panel discussion and I want to turn now to my colleague Hannah from the European Commission who's also been monitoring the chat Hannah what's been happening in the chat what questions are there for the panelists to address Hello Ben hello to everybody from the European Commission yes as you say this idea of trust the teachers has really met with a very positive response with our participants other things that they certainly are agreeing with is this sense of being not only a little bit fatigued by online learning and by perhaps professional development but perhaps a little bit of a fear that they may be forced into this way of working in the future and of course there's a lot of agreement of the fact that there has been a shift but what the best thing to do would be to find a balance and to try and identify what has worked well and to carry that into the future there was a very interesting comment that was also noted we've been talking a lot I think in the panel and in the chat talking about the very personal experience the human experience about how people feel about collaborating but how when it's public when you are online and when you are sharing your pedagogy that creates a different feeling and one participant said that this could actually be seen as very positive rather than something to be afraid of that you are building a sense of standards for your own profession and I think that supports what the panel have also been talking about so in terms of questions a lot of people asking what this means for the future I think you've already talked about how we can modify the design of online professional development to make it attractive to ensure that it is of high quality and effective that it provides teachers with practical examples and the confidence that they need as individuals however I think there's a question lasting in the chat at the moment which is about how apart from the design of online professional development can we shift the attitude towards it what other things around it need to change in order that it's seen as something positive that we want to include into our professional identity and our professional work I'm not sure if a particular panelist would like to respond to that first and then I can maybe pick up a few more questions from the chat any volunteers that's a difficult question for sure well I can attest to that having spent quite large chunks of my life trying to persuade policymakers to do things differently I don't have the answer actually and that's what sent me back I spent three years in Whitehall in London working with the Department for Education on trying to develop what was then called an e-learning strategy and it had six major recommendations one of which was teacher professional development to help to support this this was about 15 years ago and as soon as I left the department that was the one that was taken out the very one that was almost the most important thing on the whole thing hinged on teachers being better supported in being able to do this and that's what drove me back to academe basically I mean if you can't do it through policymakers and they shift around so much you know you get you get someone who's really enthusiastic and then they move on or a minister gets reappointed something else I don't know if it works the same way in other countries but it's too far too politicized so the only way we can do anything is from our own teacher training and teacher development education departments and institutions and agencies I think that's the best way forward it's precisely what you're doing then in other words many thanks dana um yes please yeah I might come in on that just briefly it's it I mean it is though one of those very difficult challenges and certainly with with the online space and just to mention one of the things that we are doing at the moment and it it will develop into the future but where we provide advisor support to schools physically which is is being provided online at the moment but where where we are looking towards in the future is that those the advisor support for our digital technologies team for example will be supplemented by our online courses and so a blended model where perhaps somebody goes into a school provides bespoke support but also then points the teachers in the direction of an online course that they you know that would be beneficial for them to engage in perhaps before the advisor comes back on their their next visit and and trying to get a model like that so we've been doing it we've been doing that to a smaller extent over the last couple of years but I think it's something that we will be doing more of once and once advisors are back physically in schools so it will be kind of you know dividing the the support up into into face-to-face online but actually blending them together so it's it's one seamless provision and to a school rather than separate online and separate face-to-face events any thanks Madeline um Daniel anything you want to add um yes you do no I could say I'm not sure it's not only for online courses but I think a really important point is we're doing it in my organization now when we want to educate teachers in my case it's in IT and pedagogy we activate several levels in an organization as Diana said it might be very hard to influence policymakers but as a provider you can at least suggest that it's not just a task for one teacher it's a task for a team and management has to have the overview of why we're doing it in my practice when we're talking IT pedagogy the use of online tools digital tools and so on it's very important you know how it will um qualify your own practice as a teacher not just because you have to because it has meaning doing it and to have that meaning you have to discuss it with your colleagues you have to know if it's in line with what your institution wants so I I'm hoping we might look at it a bit more holistic also in the future both in terms of it's the entire institutions if possible several institutions together and also as Madeleine said look at the way it's organized when it's meaningful it's blended learning that's what we do when it's meaningful as teacher academy that wants to collect teachers from various countries than online is of course a basic starting point and so maybe the reflection of really looking at it is in a more holistic way I'm not sure I answered the question but I think it wasn't an important point I think yes you raised a very important point there and we do have time for one more question at least Hannah is there anything else that you would flag up well it might be something that we take into the the next discussion but this is a very interesting point that's coming through sensing that the shifts and the needs in terms of online teacher professional development are mirroring in tandem very similar to what the teachers are currently exploring or being having to do with and on behalf of their own students and there is perhaps a question there about bringing students into the reflection on teaching practice it wasn't a direct question but I think it was a reflection by one of our participants who was talking about the way in which bringing in the reflection asking students how did you feel during that lesson and how can I improve as a teacher is perhaps also itself a big shift for teachers do any of the panelists know of or have a vision for how perhaps students and teachers may be brought closer together through online teacher professional development again it's another tricky question but I see Dana might already be able to respond thank you is that okay Ben looking to you yes yes yes of course please please say Hannah go ahead Hannah well I think that's a very nice question it is one that I wrestled with while I was teaching I'm not teaching anymore but I used to do a lot with master students and of course with master students you want to bring them into kind of negotiating the way in which the the sessions went the ones that I used to have with them and one of the things that we developed around that time was the learning designer tool which is an online learning design tool it's free and open to everyone it's called the learning designer and I used to plan my sessions with the students that way and that makes your lesson plan a kind of digital object and each section of the lesson plan has a notes section underneath it which can be for the teacher to say why am I doing this particular design this way but I used to use that also for giving it to the students and asking them to comment on each of those stages so there was a little kind of panel where they could comment on my plan for that session now of course the plan often didn't work at all it didn't pan out that way but it gave them the opportunity to to sort of commentate commentate on the pedagogy and the usual things that we have you know movable there's some standard kind of survey and it was the usual you know five points on scale on you know how could you were in a few comments and so on but this was really detailed and that kind of engagement of the students with how I'm expecting them to be doing things what I'm planning and then their reactions to that was much more useful than any survey I ever did so I I think tools a bit more like that which really engaged the students in the parts they play as well as the parts we play in the learning process I think we need more things like that many thanks Diana and something from Madalena Daniela who very very quickly want to add to that and then we need to move on unfortunately there are quite a few more questions coming in the chat at the moment I see but maybe we can pick those up also in the second panel later on is there anything you want to add Madalena very quickly just the question around the students reminds me of our digital learning planning process in Ireland which is part of our school self-evaluation process and one of the really important aspects of that is student voice and surveying students and asking them about pedagogies and teachers and what they like and what works well and that has been a really important factor in terms of schools evaluating their practice both in terms of digital learning but overall school development and improvement and the student voices is seen to be very important aspect so I would fully support any you know online activities in that area great many thanks Madalena final quick word from you Daniela or are we okay to move on okay great so many thanks to all the panelists we're going to move on then to our next session of this event I'm just going to put my slides again and actually it picks up quite nicely from quite a few elements that have been mentioned in this discussion that have been coming up in the chat and that's also addressing some of the challenges or downsides of the purely online environment and the kind of challenges that we for sure are experiencing at the level of the teacher academy with the MOOCs that we offer and I want to talk about some of these challenges and how to address these challenges with a teacher who has been working with us for the last two years Eleanor Petsi from Bologna Italy who has been working a pilot project which is trying to address the challenges that you can see on the slide here because we are very aware that there are significant challenges and these are just some of them one is that there is simply a lack of awareness or if there is awareness there is a skepticism about the effectiveness of taking a course at an international level in a language that's not your native language just purely online etc there's an accessibility issue which we've also addressed partly already if you don't have the digital competence or the self-regulated learning competence to participate in these courses well you can't really benefit from them and then the final point which we're also trying to address with the work here is to see how we can offer some form of recognition to the teachers who participate in these courses because that is often lacking and it's something we'll pick up in the final panel as well so in order to address that we have introduced this pilot project for the last two years on the teacher academy where we try to couple the MOOC with its content and activity and then the international community that it generates with a school-based community in the form of study groups that exist or that take the course together that take the MOOC together and that runs in parallel to the MOOC and the results of that have been really fascinating really interesting and that's what I want to talk to to Eleanor about today um yeah to Eleanor Petsy so a warm welcome to you Eleanor thank you for joining thank you for joining us um so yeah Eleanor can you tell us a bit more about what you have done in the in the past two years and this kind of blended approach to using MOOCs in schools okay so uh first of all thanks a lot for inviting me to share my experience while I have to say that the the experience was really uh really positive engaging and from my point of view it gave a lot of positive feedback while the the implementation of the case study I run this project both at school and regional level and as for the school level I worked with a group of teachers of my school and we took a MOOC together what I have to underline is that the majority of the teachers who took the MOOC had never taken a MOOC before they they never participated in in a MOOC and this group of teachers the first experiment was with a group of about 25 teachers and they were from of different subjects and different level of language skill and ICT skills so um what you stressed before it's true because at least in Italy a lot of teachers uh don't feel at ease with English language and also with ICT language at least at my in my school because um we are a school with quite old teachers so that our knowledge of foreign language and ICT is not very very high um well uh how uh did I work with them the development of the case study was the following we met once a week uh one meeting per week to follow the development of the of the modules of the of the MOOC of the course so uh during four weeks we met regularly once a week and during these meetings these face-to-face meetings I summarized for them the main concepts the I tried to reschedule the path of the global path of the MOOC and the aim was to facilitate the the following of the of the contents of the MOOC because as I said before the majority of the teachers were a little bit afraid they were shy they they didn't feel at ease uh in plunge immediately in the wider community of European teachers so I divided them I split them into groups and they worked in small groups and in each group there was um a teacher a colleague who knew better ICT and or English languages so they could follow the MOOC together they worked together and this helped also from the point of view of time uh teachers often say that they are out of time they are very busy so having um a regular meeting face-to-face meeting helped them to follow the MOOC and to complete the MOOC because a lot of teachers say that they start the MOOC with a lot of willingness but uh they cannot end it uh complete it because of lack of time uh another very important experience was to experiment the contents of the MOOC with their students in class and to do that they did it individually but also uh through sharing with their colleagues we uh invented this new um lemma kind guests because um a colleague went to another colleague's class to observe to see the development of the implementation the the experiment and the the put in practice of the content of the module itself of the activities so they my colleagues asked for a last meeting out of the the four uh scheduled to um to share the results of their experimentation in class the same structure I uh I adopted the same structure at a regional level but there the group of teachers was um more experienced one there were um teacher trainers also and they could spread the this way of this kind of study group throughout the region uh in their schools or within the network of teacher trainers they belong to so and the second step during the the the the the lockdown was the same that blended learning but the the face-to-face meeting were replaced by uh online meeting but also always together and we we did that and in the second part uh I was helped by uh middle management staff I mean the group of first teachers who took the first um study group with me and they helped me uh to to implement the second uh the second part of the study group many thanks Eleanor I mean from what you've been saying um this has really touched upon all those key challenges that I mentioned at the at the beginning in a way it's helped the teachers who lack the confidence who don't have um digital confidence um who have language issues or who are maybe a bit skeptical and has brought them on board for the first time to try out one of these courses and if I understand right this is as a knock-on effect that you're doing it again in your school and these teachers now are even helping you to to work with further teachers so it's exactly the kind of dynamic that we were trying to achieve um why do you think this model worked so well um in in your school well I think that it it was positive because they uh see that they felt uh more at ease they felt helped in their struggle to to complete the course um as I said before they were quite shy to to interact in the wider community but with the help of the group they could do that they could enter the forums or the uh the different activities um as I said before again um working in small groups uh they they could help each other they could overcome their their lack of competencies of skills and having a tutor uh who oriented the path who summarized the the the main concept also was uh helpful for them um another positive aspect is the support of our headmaster or our regional um general director of the regional office so that as what was said before uh we felt that we were important and we were doing something important for the improvement of the whole institution so this also was a very positive aspect and also the the fact that they could implement in class they could put in practice what they have learned in the in the milk during the milk um which uh supposed that the second experience was more successful because if the first group was about 25 teachers the second one was bigger uh we were more or less 70 people taking the milk and it was positive because those who took the milk the first time they took it again the second time and they are now um autonomous in a way to follow mocks individually because I think that the majority of teachers a little bit um well they need a plus of support to to be autonomous so not all the teachers of my school demonstrated the same willingness so this could be the room for improvement uh in my school but we we were a quite a big group so I was very happy with that great many thanks um and and what advice and if you could keep it very brief if possible what advice would you offer to other teachers teacher educators of school leaders who might want to replicate something like this what's really crucial in that setup well I think that the very very the first crucial aspect is the support of the headmaster or in my case the regional director uh the the the general director of the regional office um so again what we said before um school leaders should think that what the teachers are trying to do are trying to learn is important for the general for the global improvement of their institution and on the other hand for teachers feeling supported by their headmaster ahead with mistress um is is really something that make them feel important in the in the progression in the implementation of good practice best practice in at school and another advice if I can give it is to to try to create networks of schools in order to maximize benefits and minimize efforts this is something I tried to do at a regional level we created a sort of networks of schools and trainers at regional level and then we could spread the word and spread the the practice the static group uh all over the region so this is and also to to create um what I called before a middle management a group of teachers who have already taken some courses and can help the trainer to implement and to support other teachers to to learn and and to train at the same way they are training themselves again so it's um I think that these at least in my experience these were the the main aspects that worked well in a positive way many thanks Eleanor so um maybe in in just one or two sentences um just targeting the the policy makers in the audience what kind of um things would you suggest do we need um or do teachers need to implement something like this a bit more systematically um at a systemic level what what can policy makers do to support this type of work well I I speak um as an Italian teacher so I I referred to my uh to my professional experience and you know in Italy uh professional development is something compulsory but um it's not it's not it's not officially recognized it is officially recognized but it it doesn't count in your professional career so I think that first of all this could be if a teacher uh committed himself himself or herself in uh in such a training it should be officially recognized and it should there should be some a sort of progression in in his or her career but um I I cannot do I can't do anything about it but about this but I think that um if um if some links between a teacher academy for instance and um school leadership or regional national level of administration could be created I think that accreditation but also the the creation of best practice practice groups can be created these groups who can share their experience and serve a sort of a model to other um other institutions other organizations and and so on and so and also of course thinking about a system of recognized and official accreditation uh what we tried to do at regional at our regional level was to when uh combining these two ways of training um following the MOOC and uh following uh face-to-face meetings so our regional office uh provided an official certificate for um well for this kind of training so if uh it could be it could exist this possibility to uh to link the the two aspects uh accreditation from teacher academy and official institutional accreditation from I mean uh regional office in my case but if it could be at a national level it would be even better so these are my ideas many many thanks Eleanor and um it allows us to really nicely move to the next panel in fact but we come back to this issue of um recognition for more recognition um with uh yeah one of our panelists for sure who's who's a quite an expert on that so many thanks for sharing your experiences uh on that Eleanor and um just to say that there will be a webinar um on Monday on this coming Monday next week 14th of December where Eleanor will be again and also the other pilot teachers who are part of that so if you are interested in this do join us on that more information on the school education gateway on that so um now coming to the um the final panel uh for today um one second while I show my slides um I want to uh welcome uh Noysa Pedro, Patricia Wastio and Ana Maria Hernandez to the second panel where we move on to talk about more specifically the question of scalability we've talked a lot about um how we can develop effective impactful professional development through online but also through blended as just in the example with um with Eleanor um but now let's talk a bit more about scalability because that's also really crucial and picks up one of the main opportunities that the online sphere offers us um it's one of the key aspects of MOOCs of course but scalability comes into other forms of professional development as well so um our panelists today um are for this panel are Ana Maria Hernandez Martinez who works at the Spanish National Institute of Education Technologies and Teacher Training um which which is part of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Education in Spain where she has specialized in online collaboration and use of technology for teaching and learning Patricia Wastio who's principal advisor for research and innovation uh within European school net network of uh Ministries of Education uh across Europe where she's also head of its knowledge team and finally uh Noysa Pedro who's professor in education and teacher training at the Institute of Education University of Lisbon and Noysa is also involved in some of the work linked to accreditation of MOOCs or accreditation of professional development of teachers so looking forward to hear from all three of you um the first question all well the overarching question is how do we scale up impactful teacher professional development and the first question I want to raise to you Ana uh and hear about your experiences in in in Spain because you've developed quite a few innovative formats of professional development what type of formats can we use to scale up um teacher professional development and what are the opportunities and challenges of that yes thank you Ben you should be able to control the slides um okay yes okay thank you yeah so um yeah hello to everybody um I'm going to present our training offer from the INTEF the National Institute of Educational Technology and Teacher Training in Spain which is part of the Ministry of Education uh first of all I wanted to highlight the fact that our online offer is closely linked to the development of the digital competence it was already mentioned in the previous panel that it is important to develop the digital skills and competence in teachers and when in all all our online courses that you can see here on the right side um you will see what areas as you can see on the other side the five areas of our common uh digital competence framework for teachers are going to be developed when completing and when developing these online courses so it is important that both are linked and teachers know how they're improving as well the digital skills while completing an online course so we've got as our main uh formats we've got our online tutor courses I will explain a bit later MOOC that have been mentioned already as well MOOC that you maybe know they're a bit the same way as MOOC same structure but they are shorter in time three hours approximately uh SPOOK which you can do at your own pace and edupeals which are even shorter it's only some minutes maybe 15 30 minutes and you can complete these courses in your own mobile form you just need to download the app and that's it okay we will go through them in the following um slides I just wanted to show you here some numbers related mainly to the number of enrolled participants as you can see here the total is more than 8 000 uh participants and I want you to take a look at the difference between the number of participants in our online tutor courses which is 10 000 approximately but the number is is much higher in the MOOC and edupeals learning experiences I wanted to highlight this fact because this is mainly due to the fact that our online tutor courses they're controlled and they're limited since you need to have a tutor for we've got one tutor for every 30 participants approximately so it would need a very very high investment if we want to reach 80 000 participants with these courses so that's why our online open courses such as MOOC, MOOC and edupeals reach a greater number of participants since they are open I also wanted to highlight another difference in number whereas our open courses reach a higher number of participants the completion rate is lower as you can see here for MOOC and MOOC is 5 and 18 percent whereas in online tutor courses it is more than 60 again this difference is because with the online tutor courses you've got a tutor which is going to be your guide is going to assess and evaluate your task whereas in the MOOC and MOOC we've got peer assessment as the main form of evaluation so this leads some participants to start the course but maybe they don't finish it or they don't complete the task because also and this will lead me to the next challenge let's see let's say sorry it's because when completing your MOOC or MOOC you don't have an official accreditation this was also mentioned by Elena right now in her experience so it is right that sorry it is true that regarding target and accreditation it is quite different for the tutor courses you need to be an active working teacher in our state school or in education administration and it is you can you can access by a public call and you complete 70 hours of training which will give you seven credits so you've got official accreditation this also contributes to the engagement of the participant whereas on the other formats and scalable format MOOC you receive a digital badge but this is not an official recognition it is just a badge that you can have in your we say the backpack badge backpack and you can manage and store and share the digital badges there this is these are the main differences that will allow scalable format courses but as we have been seeing of course there are some challenges on one side we can see we can say this is successful because we reach a very high number of participants as you have seen before we are promoting social learning and interaction and collaboration for the final digital product and we also create communities and networks contributing to the lifelong learning also as we mentioned we contribute to the improvement of digital competence and other professional competencies and the good thing about that as well is that this MOOC and edupeals give you more flexibility and you can manage your own learning time also they follow a connectivist approach with a social character in which social spaces virtual communities and denomization play a vital role these are the good points let's say of these scalable formats but we also have challenges of course we want to reach a higher number we want more schools to improve the digital competence more teachers among students we would like to extend our training plan relating it to the digital competence framework and we also it is flexible our plan depends on the main trends every year and according to the situation for example this year with the this COVID situation we promoted a lot of how to plan an online lesson for example and the last one and already mentioned as I said before by Elena is the official recognition which is also and still a main challenge we do not have official recognition for this MOOC and MOOC we just have these digital badges but we are trying and it's still a challenge to achieve an official recognition maybe with blended learning this could be a solution we're working on that and of course it's one of the main challenges that should be addressed for for teachers mainly many thanks Anna for that our experience yeah thank you yeah many thanks Anna for that overview there was a question regarding edupeals and if you can elaborate on those but we'll come back to that when we have some time for question answer at the end so yeah so I think that gave us a good overview and also really introduces some of the key questions that your fellow panelists will address so I want to come now to hold on I need to take control I want to come now to Patricia Wastia to address the next question of this panel how can we ensure that teachers actually engage and fully benefit from these new formats because as Anna was saying the participation well the people a lot of teachers start or enroll in these courses but not necessarily many finish and I saw a comment in the chat that talked about the importance of personal support now at European School Nets you've been working on a project which to a certain extent directly addresses that question so be curious to hear more from you about this so good afternoon everyone the question of how we can increase participation and retention of teachers and student teachers in online learning environment like look was precisely the question at the core of the teacher policy experimentation that has been run across 10 countries with the support of the the Erasmus program so to address that question teacher tested in field trial a personalized support mechanism with randomly selected teachers and student teachers these group was less numerous than the teachers in four courses courses addressing competence areas that are key for teachers nowadays like formative assessment personalized learning collaborative learning and creative thinking so the personalized form mechanism that was that has been tested in field trial was made of nine different intervention based on triggers and actions so triggers were the were based on information collected on each participant about prior experience and also about the the way they behave during the course itself the actions implemented were implemented by support agents so human being acting online and those support agents who processed the information about participants experience and behavior acted online by sending individualized online messages to those identified in need and this is a very important aspect I'd like to highlight here the fact that teacher aimed to focus the support to those in need so not to everyone in the courses but those according to several specific circumstances and characteristics where supposed to be potential dropout participants so all these predictors of dropout were identified through research finding and this was precisely the option chosen by by teacher and by the way targeting those in needs as revealed to be a very important challenge in itself that we did experience during teacher as we noticed during the first courses that we were not precise enough in that targeting and we we we have faced the need to improve alongside the road to increase the preciseness of of our targeting and and we indeed observe that result where much better like that so if we move to the next slide here we can see that this quite simple support mechanism that we have implemented in the field trial resulted in an increase by 10% point of completion for those who benefited from from it no at this point you might ask yourself is it so simple that sending online messages increase retention and completion in a course not exactly of course but what is important here and let me give them a few example of messages sent by the support agents to those in need these matches messages could just simply be about reminding them that they didn't start the course what is quite basic but it might also turn into the offer of a one to one video session to discuss for example how they manage their learning strategy online to discuss how to address the content to explain to them how to use the interfacing tools available in in the course and so on and so forth just to name a few of the nine intervention possible all addressing issues that we have identified in preliminary research so if we now go to to the next slide we try to to understand of course what were the dynamic explaining the the the impact that we have observed this increase of 10% percentage point and we we identified four main dynamics one is the sense of being observed so reproducing in a way the sort of interaction and social control between comma that you can observe in in phase two phase environment meaning that what you do you realize as a participant even in an online environment that what you do is noticed and is noticed in relation to your own single personal behavior so for some participants this process this dynamic has even been perceived a bit negatively as with feeling a sense of control but it was useful for some and some look at it from a much more positive point of view and felt a sort of not being left alone in the course realizing that someone was there to help and also this presence was reducing this possible sense of social isolation you can feel in an online environment a third dynamic that was at stake is is the prompting aspect so just to be reminded that you have to start and you didn't start yet your course or that you need to submit an activity that you didn't yet submit might really represent useful help even if basic but useful help for teachers possibly also student teachers participating to to such kind of online courses in the middle of many many other activities and with very limited time available and the the last dynamic that was at stake was this guidance aspect helping participants to be able to proceed so sometimes you do not proceed with something you do not submit something just because you didn't know and just being given the opportunity to ask a question to get an immediate answer even through an exchange of email help you to solve the problem and and to indeed complete what you are expected to to complete if we go to the next slide we can hear i'd like to summarize here the advice we can give on the basis of this policy experiment to ensure that teachers engage in MOOCs type of learning opportunities and there are here six hexagons representing six areas where it's interesting to to act the first group of of action to take is to indeed support the newcomers it's first time usually they they participate to an online course and they don't have prior experience they don't know exactly how to manage their own way of and their own strategy in in in learning online so it's helpful to address them directly also to reach out the non-starters as i already mentioned just reminding them that they should start also generate this feeling of there is someone somewhere looking at what you do but as much as possible from a constructive and positive sense just to break this sense of isolation and possibly also activate this sense of a sort of you are you committed to do something so let's try to to be supported to to do it and the importance of also offering such kind of one-to-one support session you do not have to be afraid when you offer such kind of online courses to online such modality as it is not so much necessary in demand from the point of view of the participant but what is probably very important is that they realize they they are just offer that this kind of one-to-one session and this personalized way of being supported but just realize that if you want to implement all that you need to plan from the beginning the collection of information enabling you to identify the specific needs and possibly the preferences of the participants so you need to do it also in a non-anonymous way because it is personalized so you need to know who is looking for what and also in a fully transparent way for the participants to be fully aware of it. Another area that is promising in ensuring teacher engagement with MOOC is to offer diverse support mechanism and this is very important because we should really learn to teachers as learners that have different beliefs on how you learn and different expectations and different needs so in the the policy experimentation the content differ depending the offer to the participants but the process to do it was exactly the same all the time so through these exchanges of messages and possibly one-to-one session and the last option that we suggest from this from teacher is also we didn't do that in in teacher but to consider machine-based support system as a way to use the potential of technology to facilitate the answer to the diversity of human needs as learners so it's not to define one massive solution reinforcing the one size fits all approach but all the contrary to use the potential of the technology to personalize what is able to be implemented and these are the main lessons learned from the the teacher policy experimentation. Many thanks Patricia I think some very important messages for those colleagues here at the event working in particular on MOOCs but also in other environments and I think that's really the crucial thing that this model that was used in teacher was scalable it was focused on scalability there were a couple of comments in the chat which highlighted the importance of feedback of not being alone and that's always been a challenge of that personalized feedback and that's always been a challenge in that sort of scalable and that MOOC environment so this offers some key pointers and how we can achieve that many thanks. Now unfortunately we don't we are running a bit out of time but we do have one more speaker here on this panel and addressing that very crucial point about accreditation that was picked up a couple of times earlier by by some of the speakers and also in the chat so I want to come now to to Noiza Pedro and address this question to you why are many of these new formats that Patricia that Anna have been talking about not formally recognized and what can we do to address this? Hello Ben, hello everyone it's nice to be with you today discussing this very relevant issue this is not new but this is very relevant nowadays and it will be even more in the future so I think that we have to become aware that in the last years a significant increase was found in the number of teachers who get involved conscientiously and autonomously I mean informal and not recognized professional development activities so a big part of them are conducted online through online collaborative communities through online conferences and webinars as well as massive online open courses these are developed locally or nationally but a significant part of them is international and these two aspects the fact that these activities are developed online and in an international setting are the reasons why most of these training actions are not aligned with the rules that each country have for the certification and the accreditation of teachers continuous training activities or in-service training so why are most of these new formats not formally recognized? I would say that countries had the the needs to develop national regulations and quality standards for the recognition of teachers continuous professional development at CPD and for their career progression and this is critical this is very important and we cannot ignore or remove these rules especially for teachers sake so because we are talking about career progression this is critical and should be considered with very very careful but some of these rules I also see that they do not suit the flexible format that these online training activities assume for example I need to think about reality in Portugal teachers training activities most of them they have rules that are difficult to be respected by the type of impactful and scalable online training solutions that we are talking today I would like to share with you some examples so by default teacher training activities are based on face-to-face format and I would say that this is the reality in most of the countries they also allow online training but this is an additional solution not the main core of teachers training at least I think this was the reality before last March since then I would say that many countries and Portugal inside of those countries decided that teachers training activities were allowed to be conducted fully online another issue is the ratio between trainees or teachers and the trainers so in Portugal we have a ratio of 20 teachers per trainer or 30 teachers per trainer but there is a ratio that must be considered and respected the limit of hours is also relevant so we have a limit that goes from a minimum of 12 hours until 15 this can be flexibleized but there is a limit also the concept of attendance this is based on the idea that the trainees or the teachers must be present in at least two-thirds of the training sessions so a rigorous process of attendance record is developed and this means that when activities are conducted online this puts pressure on trainers to develop more activities based on synchronicity so synchronous activities in order to fill this requirement of a tendency also the assessment process and the grading methods they are based on traditional practices I would say that it's difficult to say it in another way so it's based on tests or individual assignments and these might might need to be developed in a written form if it is required that even if it's not proper to do it in a written form so the assignment needs to be presented in a face-to-face session and this is not really something that we can do in a MOOC solution right where most of them are based on peer assessment and peer assessment is not recognized as valid for legal issues so these rules were developed for ensuring quality those are relevant but I would say that some of them are very difficult to see as suitable as we expected to be thinking about online scalable solutions so I do see a need for change and I think that all of us see the need for change in that I would like also to share the idea that in Portugal presently it is possible for a teacher to have a MOOC recognized or even other international fully online training formats like taking part of international project meetings from at winning or Erasmus plus this is possible to be recognized but the process is not automatic and it's not clear some teachers know that they can do it and they present all the documentation that is required but some teachers don't even know they they can do this so I see this to be something that needs to be changed in the future and indeed we are aiming to do this in the future mainly I would say in the next year 2021 we think about starting a national project I would say a pilot study and having MOOCs recognized and certified officially has a new format for teacher training this study will be developed with a group of teacher training centers specifically selected for that and they have to to make us completely ensure that they have the opportunity of fulfilling two requirements the first is to have a online platform that is suitable for MOOCs and the other one is to have a well-prepared training team and this means scientific pedagogically and also technologically competent group of trainers for ensuring this type of format for teacher training so this is what we have been doing and what we have in our agenda for the next year also I would like to address the second question and that is what we can do collectively to address this issue I will start by saying that countries need to accept the idea that 2020 required but also allows us the opportunity to adopt new approaches for addressing the problem that we have now that that is providing in time and easy to use continuous professional development opportunities for teachers mainly by taking advantage of digital technologies and online environments also I think that policymakers must ensure that schools as well as teachers have access to updated technology and proper connectivity services so we are thinking about scalable solutions and these require scalable and reliable technology and this is still an issue in European schools COVID-19 proved us that additionally I think that ministries of education as well as all the organizations involved in regulating CPD need to accept the idea that they need to review and update their regulations I think this is critical this is a critical truth and we cannot move aside from that secondly I would like to see that the institutions that provide MOOCs for teacher training as well as other impactful and scalable online teacher solutions teacher training solutions they need to take into consideration the rules that different countries and different visions have regarding the accreditation of teachers training also I would like to add an idea and personally I personally I would like this to be something that we take with us for the next years that was to see a movement similar to the Bologna process that was developed in 1999 so many years ago in which 29 countries work together to ensure the mutual recognition of high education qualifications and I would like this to be developed in teachers continuous professional development this is already established in initial teacher training or initial teacher education so I think we should take a step forward and try to think about common standards and regulation for teachers continuous professional development thank you very much many thanks Noza and I think what a very important and powerful message right at the end a Bologna process for the recognition of teachers professional development activities now we were planning for a quick Q&A session at the end and there's been quite a few comments in the chat but unfortunately we have run out of time so I'm going to pass on now well first of all thank you very much to to you three panelists for I think there's some very very interesting insights there and if you've been following the chat also very much echoed by by the participants there in particular I would say the issue on recognition being recognized as a primary issue and also the bureaucracy around offering teacher professional development so yeah so many thanks for all the contributions also in the chat I want to pass now for the closing statement again to my colleague Hannah from the commission over to you thank you very much Ben this has been for myself personally professionally an incredible afternoon and I hope you have all enjoyed it as well typically what we would do at in December at the end of a year as we would look back and be grateful for all the people and events that have happened that have shaped us we know it's been a very interesting and unexpected year I hope that this afternoon has been an opportunity for us all to take a deep breath and and to have a look back and think what we can actually be be thankful for firstly on behalf of the European Commission we've actually got many thanks to make right now firstly for this event for the chair for all the panelists for the support team that have made this possible there has been so much food for thought and expert perspectives from around Europe that I think we're all incredibly grateful for so thank you very much for for taking the time to join us and of course to all of you within this meeting space but also watching on YouTube as well the participation of all from ministry representatives other policymakers teacher educators stakeholder organization representatives teachers school leaders whoever you are thank you so much I think one of the key messages we will take away we can all take away from this session has been about really recognizing the importance of being active in collaboration and how important that is to professional development our director general mentioned that the Erasmus program will look to support this in the future particularly in bringing together teacher education providers closer in terms of collaborating around the new possibilities for teacher professional development another keyword I think we can all take away is recognition and that's the the concept that we finished with this afternoon that this is also key about valuing online professional development part of a much broader shift in education shifts in attitude shift in understanding shifts in confidence incompetence about blending different approaches to teaching and learning and this is certainly something that we as the European Commission want to work on more closely in the future thank you all if you took part in the digital education action plan online public consultation and gave us all of that really rich feedback about what we what we can improve what we can better support we really value that and we want to take that forward also thirdly to think about again why we are here it is to because we all want to improve the diversity and the support for teacher and school leader careers ultimately for the benefit of all learners the motivation competence the opportunities to grow and to go on a professional journey are all vital and we must all strive to remember that I think we do perhaps there's ways in which we can work with the wider community to also develop that understanding so thank you so much to all those who are currently engaged in that kind of work in your own country at a local level in your school perhaps if you've joined us as part of the et 2020 working group schools those supporting e-twinning those supporting the school education gateway are heartfelt thanks at the end of this year in particular and thanks to those who worked on the research report which has really built like the teach up project some really important evidence that we can all use across Europe to develop in this field so a lot to be thankful for hopefully a lot to look forward to as well but from the European Commission we would like to wish you all the best for a peaceful and restful end to this year and a courageous start to the next thank you