 All right, so a very good afternoon to everyone who has been able to join us. My name is Chloe Hill and I am the EGU's policy officer. I'm very happy to welcome you to today's webinar, Engaging with Geoscience Education. As some of you may be aware, the EGU has been putting on these webinars about once a month or so, basically starting after the sharing geoscience event that was in May. And we do plan on continuing these webinars basically once a month indefinitely. So if you enjoy this webinar, if you've enjoyed previous webinars, you can have a look at the EGU's webinar page for upcoming webinars. You can also obviously follow us on social media as well. Now, today's webinar is being hosted by the EGU's Education Committee. And it will focus on some of the opportunities that EGU offers to those who are involved in teaching or basically anyone who's interested in education. To give you some more information about this, I'm going to hand the virtual microphone over to Chris King, who is the chair of the Education Committee. And just to let you know, if you do have any questions, you can put those in the Q&A box right down the bottom of your screen. So not necessarily the chat box, but the Q&A box is where we'll be taking questions on. So without further ado, I'm going to pass the virtual microphone over to Chris King. Well, welcome everybody. And many thanks indeed for your interest in education. And those of us who are interested in education are interested in what we can do for education. And that's what this is all about. So I'm now going to share my screen with you. We practiced this earlier, so it might work. And I'm hoping that you can now see my screen. And so this is our Engaging with US Arts Education webinar. And what we're going to look at is brief details about the Education Committee. Then we're going to look at our strategy for an Enhancing US Arts Education, where that strategy came from, who we're targeting. And then my colleagues are going to feed into this. And then we're going to have a summary at the end. So that's where this seminar is going. So the committee, this committee, as you can see here on the screen, normally meets face-to-face twice a year at the EGU General Assembly in April. And we also have a meeting in Munich in September. That's not going to happen this year because, of course, the coronavirus. But we have lots of other interactions by Zoom, by email. And why do we do this? Well, the aims of our committee, the objectives are, as you can read there, to support and promote geoscientification at all levels across Europe and beyond. And also to raise the profile of education with EGU. And that's partly why we're doing this today. And, of course, to publicise the educational activities of the EGU. And that's a central part of what this webinar is all about. These are the members of the committee, as you can see from across Europe. And the membership is for three years that's renewable. So here is our strategy for enhancing geoscience education. And where do we get the background information from for putting the strategy together? Well, there has been an international survey carried out that covered these 12 European countries. And so we looked at the data from those 12 European countries. And what did it show? Well, it showed that most countries, as you can see here, have earth science in the primary curriculum, only about three quarters in the lower secondary curriculum, not many at all in the upper secondary curriculum. And importantly, while many countries follow the curriculum closely, that's the earth science curriculum or the geoscience curriculum, some countries in Europe don't follow the curriculum closely, meaning they basically don't teach very much earth science. And the percentage of countries which carry out assessment is relatively low, especially when you read the two-thirds of the secondary level are only of those limited number of countries that teach earth science. So that's quite a low level of assessment. But most importantly, we find that most earth science across Europe is not taught by earth science specialists. Less than half the countries provide support for teachers in their teaching of earth science. And the quality of teaching materials that teachers have available to them in schools and colleges is only moderate. It's not high. It's not low either, which is good, but it's not. It's only moderate. And something else you're probably aware of, there are increasing numbers of reports of falling numbers of people applying for geoscience degrees across Europe, and that certainly is the case in the UK. We also know from research findings that the most cost-effective way of improving geoscience education is to target teachers and other educators, not pupils. Lots of organizations do do things for pupils, but that's not the most cost-effective way of doing things as the research shows. And something else that's critical here is that geoscience educators need to have good teaching materials, but that on its own is not enough. These materials need to be put into the hands of teachers. They need to be shown how to use them, and then there is an impact that can be measured as a result of those activities. So these are the underpinning things for our document, our strategy. And the strategy recognizes these five different groups, which I'll explain a little bit more as we go through, but these are teachers of geoscience who do have strong backgrounds. There are many thousands of teachers who have weak backgrounds, teachers in higher education universities, providers of informal geoscience education, that's in geoparks and museums and so on, and researchers into geoscience education. And we're going to look at each of those groups now and look at what EGU and our committee is doing to support those different groups. So we're looking at teachers who have strong geoscience backgrounds now. They might have done a geoscience degree. They've had good training in how to teach geoscience. What do we do for these people? Well, first of all, we invite them to gift workshops. These are geoscience information for teachers workshops. What are these things? Well, I hope you might have encountered them already, but if not, whenever there's a major geoscience conference somewhere in the world, and particularly the EGU conferences, we have a gift workshop alongside, and geoscientists are invited to give 45-minute summaries of the current research on the area that they are researching. So these are experts in their field. They're prominent, high-profile people who come to talk to the teachers and give them updates on the research. We also include hands-on practical teaching activities. We'll show you some of these a little bit later. The workshops normally run for two and a half days, and the EGU is fantastically generous in providing burst refunding to cover the travel and low-cost accommodation for every teacher that comes, or sometimes if they're coming from far away, part of that accommodation and travel costs. So I'm going to have a quick look at the example of what happened last year. I can't look at the example of what happened this year because we had to postpone the workshop this year because of the coronavirus. But last year our workshop was Plate Tectonics and Earth Structure, and we're going to have a brief look now at Christophe Vigny and what he said. Unfortunately, we've discovered that you can see what he's saying, but you won't be able to hear what he's saying. So I'm just going to show you a brief clip of what happened there. And then after that, I'm going to show you a brickquake video on one of the practical activities that followed the session on earthquakes. Now, this one doesn't have sound either, but I can talk over that to show you how that worked. So first of all, Christophe Vigny, I'm going to have to stop sharing my screen now. So bear with me while I do this. But thank you for your patience. Here we are, I can see Christophe again. And what Christophe is doing, he is a global expert on earthquakes. And he's got a picture here of the devastating earthquake in Japan. And he's starting off by explaining that big earthquakes to the public across the world are the earthquakes that kill many people. And you can see he's got on the screen now the number of people that were killed in the different earthquakes. But to a scientist, a big earthquake is an earthquake that generates the most energy. And if you look at the screen that he's got there at the moment, the Japan earthquake, which only killed, and he says that in what he's saying, only killed 20,000 people, that was a very large earthquake on the measurement scale of nine. Whereas the earthquakes that killed the most people here are with much smaller earthquakes. And then he's gonna go on to explain why this is the case. It's because of the number of buildings, the investment in the area, the quality of the buildings. And so his whole 45 minute presentation covers this sort of data and gives everybody an update on how all that works. So this is an example then of a gift presentation. And I'm now going to stop sharing this screen. And what I'm showing you here is a practical activity that was followed up on the earthquake thing that you saw. And this is called brickquake. And we're going to run brickquake now, I hope. Yep, we're going to run it now. And what you can see here is how you can simulate an earthquake in your classroom. So I think you can see on your screen that we've got some bricks, some string around the brick. We've got a bungee cord, an elastic cord and a tray of water. So we're asking the question, what do you think is gonna happen when we pull that bungee cord? And then we would turn off the video and let people think about that question. And now we've come back to it and people are going to say what they think is gonna happen and then we'll give it a go. And here it is, we got a small movement there. So that was simulating an earthquake. What can we measure to find out how these things work? And again, you could talk about that. You can measure the amount of pull. You can measure how much movement there's been. And you can measure how long it takes between before the earthquake moves. And so we're now going to have another go. Now we can measure those different things. And you can see that this time there was a much bigger movement for a very similar pull. Here's a third time we're doing it this time, our little movement and then a much bigger movement. Now this shows that this is a very strange activity because it's one of the only activities you'll ever see in a classroom that is deliberately designed to be unpredictable. Every time you do it, it's different. The amount of force, the amount of time and the amount of movement is different every time. Now you might have seen when we were doing this that as we pulled it, a shimmer ran across the water. You can see the shimmer happening now. Did you see that movement across the water? Those are surface waves. The surface of the water went up and down and that's what the surface waves are. So the earthquake generated surface waves here and you can magnify the movement by firing a laser pointer at the water and onto the wall. And you can see how that movement is magnified because that shows how a seismometer works. Now I'm just going to move this on now. So what's happening here is the movement of the bricks is simulating a fault. We've got friction preventing that movement and the bungee cord is producing the pressure which is plate movement. And so what we're seeing here is something that's unpredictable. And there is a summary here that shows the setup and also some of the data. And if you look at the data there, if you measure the distance moved, multiply it by the force, the energy released, you find it's different every time. So this shows the earthquakes are indeed unpredictable. So that's our brickquake activity. I'm stopping sharing the screen there. I hope that worked reasonably well for you. It was a bit strange for me because I was trying to talk over the words that I could hear that I was saying. So I don't know how it came across to you but what we're doing now is we are now going to share the screen again. Can I go back to my PowerPoint now? And here it is. And you can see here some of the feedback we got from the gift conference in 2019. The orange areas are the highest possible level of feedback. And so the 70 odd teachers who were there were very pleased with what they received over the three days. And now I'm going to tell you about the rest of the gift conferences because we have the annual Vienna gift conference. We also run gift conferences as part of the IGCs, International Geological Congresses across the world. We run capacity building gift shops in developing countries, less economically developed countries. And those workshops, there are four of those. And the first one starts with fall funding and then goes down phase by phase to a little bit of funding in the fourth year to enable them to run workshops like these themselves. And then finally in the gift family, we have collaborative workshops where we work with other organizations to offer to school teachers experiences in dynamic areas of Europe, such as in Northern Greece, the Corinth Rift or Sicily, the Etna Volcano. So those are the gift workshops and these are the brochures of the gift workshops that we've run recently. Sad to say, because of coronavirus, you've heard already that we've had to postpone the 2020 workshop to 2021. That's called Water in the Solar System. That's fully subscribed, I'm afraid. We also had to cancel the gift workshop in India, which gets associated with the IGC. The one in Mexico due to run this year is rolled over to 2020. And we don't know yet about where the Corinth Rift workshop is going to run online. We can send you some details soon. And they're still deciding about Etna. So coronavirus sadly has had a big impact on gift this year. Something else we do for teachers with strong GSIs background is we have developed a European chapter. And this is a chapter of organizations supporting GSIs education. It's overseen by the IGEO, the International GSIs Education Organization. And together with the EGU, it's overseeing this chapter. And you can see the organizations that's involved in that from different countries across Europe down at the bottom here. And we are planning to expand this in the future as the chapter gathers pace. So those are the teachers that have good GSIs backgrounds. What about those teachers who have weak GSIs backgrounds? Now, these are normally geography or science teachers. They may be trained in geography or biology or chemistry or physics. And they may not be terribly interested in teaching GSIs. And they may not have had any training in that at all in their background at school, in college or during their teacher training. So what can we do for these people? Because there are tens of thousands of these teachers across the world who are having to teach GSIs without the background. Well, the first thing we have done is to put together a syllabus that we recommend to all curriculum developers across the world for what children should know by the age of 16. And this is the syllabus. It's a single page. It doesn't look too daunting. And that's what we believe people should learn. We have also supported that syllabus with a textbook. It's a free to download textbook. You can go to this web address and you can download it today. And it supports everything that was said in the syllabus with lots of examples and lots of background information. And we have also set up a website. This is the Earth Learning Idea website. It has at the moment 345 teaching activities in English. Next week, there will be 346 because we add a new activity every two weeks. And so far, this has been translated into 11 languages with translations into over 1150 translations. Is this website popular? Well, as you can see here, 40,000 downloads per month across the world and approaching 5 million downloads so far. This is beyond what we ever expected when we set up the website. So it clearly is being of important value to people across the world. So that's the Earth Learning Idea website and the brickquake activity that you just saw comes from the Earth Learning Idea website. And how is that information used? Well, the information is being used across Europe by our field officer network. And this is where I pass over to Gina, who has been a field officer with EGU for over a year now. And she can tell you what it's like doing that really important job across Europe. So Gina, over to you. Okay, thank you for the opportunity to share my experience. As a Geoscience Education field officer. And first I will introduce the Geoscience Education field officer's family. This family is included four members from Europe, one from Italy, France, Spain and Portugal and two from non-European countries, India and Morocco. The last supported by the International Union of Geological Sciences and International Geoscience Education Organization. The main goal of this international program is to providing professional development to school teachers and future teachers from primary to secondary schools in teaching the elements of Geoscience appropriate for their teaching curriculum through interactive workshops. Workshop subjects include curricular contents such as late tectonics, rock cycle, seismology, timescale and history of earth and volcanology. But field officers are also able to promote Geopark training courses. In future, this program will be extended and will include seven more countries, seven more field officers, four from Europe, Albania, Germany, Hungary and Turkey and three beyond Europe, Chile, Malaysia and Togo. The current field officers were selected through a call by the European Geoscience Community on Education on the end of the year of 2018. And later we first met in Vienna in April 2018, sorry, 2019, shortly before the EU General Assembly. There we first, there we were training in the program theology and materials. Over intensive weekend training session run by Chris King. Later we received a small budget to buy material and apparatus and sorry, and for the European field officers, a small budget additional funding to support our travel and accumulations to allow us attain to the workshops, teachers and conferences venues. When field officer returned home, it was necessary to identify some local supporters to help us and support in managing the planned activities to prepare workshop kits because of the practical activities approach of the workshops. We had to set up material and equipment that attending teachers would use in the workshops and after in their classroom activities to adapt and translate activity protocols and to create practical materials according to national curricula and the teaching level of the attendees to contact national institutions to promote the program and to organize workshops and to present field officers' program at teachers' conferences. My first workshop as a field officer was held in collaboration with Eleporeira and EU Committee on Education member and one of my supporters. Workshop was included in an international meeting for science teachers and we have 40 participants. Teachers were proposed to develop themselves activities and part learning ideas site, website were presented. At the end of each workshop session, field officers provides an evaluation form to the teachers' attendance. The filling in it is not compulsory and the teachers are asked for their consent to use the evaluation form data. From for this training, the data related to the frequency of the interest appreciation levels for workshop participants shows that the highest level, five, is the most frequent feedback category. The next workshop ran with the participation of Laura Cordairo, another Portuguese supporter. Includes your science teachers and also chemistry, maths, physics and philosophy teachers. It was a big challenge, but as that attest, it was a success. Teachers said that workshop gives them ideas to interdisciplinary activities. After, during two intensive days, ran a teacher training course to secondary gel science teachers. As well on the other workshops, the group were very clarity and enthusiastic and this is visible in the overall assessment of the activity. The last workshop performed in Portugal was firstly organized to a face-to-face meeting, but due to the COVID-19, it changed to online format. So I needed to prepare a dynamic session where with activities to be carried out by the tenants in their home while I explained and demonstrated them. For this, earlier the attendees were informed about material needs. Attendees were not exclusively gel science teachers. They teach history, arts, English language and physical condition. But as we can see, the obtained data are very motivating. Due to the COVID pandemic, four workshops were postponed in Portugal, two possible for next October and the others just for next year. Geographically, you can see that workshops were set up in different locals of the country. Upcoming activities in other cities will be spread, but depends on the pandemic evolution. My experience as field officer also gave me skills to promote some activities with my 11 grade students in my classroom. Students enjoyed and were fully involved. Looking to the field officer program Global Arithmetic in 2019-2020 were performed 22 workshops in 15 different cities plus one online that involved 415 participants. And 21 workshops were postponed because of coronavirus. The score participant interest was 4.79 and we're writing positive comments on interest, methodology, organization, usefulness, pleasure, appreciation for practical knowledge provided and for the easy of transferring this knowledge to classroom practice. Also, four teachers' conferences were presented, two abstracts published, one paper submitted and field officers have two more papers in progress. To the success of this program, it contributed the excellent resources steaming from the internationally acknowledged Earth Science Education Unit experience and provided by the Earth Learning Idea, interactive hands-on approach, the collaboration and support of the Geo-Committee on Education, particularly his chair, Professor Chris King, the national field officer supporters and the permanent and collaborative interaction between field officers, an amazing and dedicated group that I really enjoy working on. Despite the good results, we intend to improve our activity so we have several challenges for future. To increase the number of workshops and participants, to extend workshop coverage over wide geographic regions, to spread and present the improvements of the program at the teachers' conferences, to discuss and test new methods and materials for distance training and to develop websites, social media apps for different countries to disseminate workshop plans and geoscience information or to host these information in websites of national geoscience organizations. Thank you for your attention. Chris, the world is almost... That was splendid, Gina. Thank you very much. And I think it gave everybody an overview of what you can achieve in just one country, Portugal, but we're doing this in other countries. And as Gina said, we're going to expand that to more and more countries in the future. So that's... We hope you enjoyed that. But now I'm going to pass over to Gordon, who is... Gordon's been representing higher education on our committee and the situation in higher education is interesting, as Gordon will no doubt explain, and he'll then go on to tell us about what's happening as a result of what he's found out. So, Gordon, over to you. Hello, everybody. I'm just about to share my screen. So I'll just wait a minute until that appears, hopefully. OK, so higher education support is a pretty new development for EGU. And the first thing that we did was to carry out a survey of what the people who teach in the university sector were actually requesting. And we find a very unanimous expression of deep interest in having some support from organizations such as EGU. So virtually everyone was interested in getting a hold of teaching resources. A lot of people wanted to network with colleagues in other countries who teach geoscience. A lot of people were interested in face-to-face workshops, but they were also interested in online opportunities as well. And there was also an expression of interest in presenting talks and contributions at conference sessions, which are held at the annual General Assembly of EGU in Vienna each year. So the first consequence of that was we introduced, despite the pandemic causing quite a lot of disruption to our plans, we were able to introduce a program of higher education teaching grants early in 2020. These awards were intended to allow individuals and groups of people from universities anywhere to develop geoscience teaching resources for higher education. And the idea was that these resources once developed would be freely downloadable by anyone who teaches geoscience at university level. The awards for 2020 have now been announced, and there's a link on that page there. And you can, I'm sure, hunt it down in the news that EGU produces in their newsletters. What I should say was that the pandemic happened during this process, and so the awards made were actually much more than we'd originally intended because it was a response by EGU to try and help with the severe disruption caused by the pandemic. The resources that these grants are going to produce should be available for everyone by April of 2021. And that will include things like websites and data packages, data analyses, manuals for those who have to teach with it, and also webinars from the authors who describe their production and application of the resource itself. In the future, we may have further rounds of these HE teaching awards. And as possibly, we've still to discuss this, but it's possible we may target these a little bit more specific. A more obvious area that would be of interest, of course, is the impact of the pandemic on the teaching of geosciences in universities, which has been profound. You just have to think about topics like fieldwork to realize how badly that has been impacted by the events over the last five or six months. So the final slide is really to give you some idea of what we are continuing to discuss for future developments that would help support education of geoscience at universities, which is critical. It's where we are educating the next generation of researchers and professionals. So we really have to look carefully at this. And as Chris mentioned earlier, we are seeing a decline in the numbers in many countries, not all possibly, but certainly in many countries we're seeing a big decline in the number of people who apply for geoscience degrees. So based upon the responses we got to our survey, we're actively now trying to promote educational sessions at the General Assembly. That's the meeting it's held every year in Vienna. Now there is already an existing mechanism where by anybody who's interested can propose an educational session at the General Assembly. It's within the EOS group of opportunities. It's, I think, true to say we don't make as much use of that as we probably should or would like to. And there are very good reasons for that, which I won't go into in detail. But clearly the program at the General Assembly is already enormously full, very, very active, very, very abundant. And we may have to look at alternative or creative ways of dealing with educational sessions if we're going to run them at those during that event. Because obviously most people who teach geoscience at university are also researchers in their own field. So they need to be free of the conflict of having to decide between going to research or going to education. The possibilities actually were highlighted by the geoscience sharing geoscience online event organized by EGU in replace of the physical General Assembly this year. So the hybrid meetings or entirely virtual meetings may be one way that we can deal with that issue and still promote the dissemination of educational resources. The other thing that might be worthy of having a look at is the fact that the General Assembly proceedings are also a very intense geoscience educational interest. If you're teaching the next generation of researchers, it's obviously really important to expose them to the latest research, to new techniques, to big debates about different topics. No way to do that might be to make sure that the proceedings of the General Assembly are in some way made more accessible to those who do teach in universities. We're also looking at workshops on higher education geoscience teaching. Again, there isn't an opportunity to run those during the actual General Assembly. We might run it, for example, in the weekend before or the weekend after. Again, there's complications with that because the venue, the conference venue, is not going to be available in the weekend before or after. But we can look at hotels and so forth. And again, we might actually run these as physical face to face events, which are very popular because there's a lot of networking advantage. We might look at the hybrid format, which has been put in place for 2021. Or we may look at entirely virtual events, which will allow anybody to attend at any time. The next thing that we are looking at is that there are enormous number of educational resources and opportunities available for those who teach geoscience at university. And we might be well advised to try and collate these things and to make sure that the people who teach them are well aware of them. So for example, we've also had offers of seminar and webinar speakers. It'd be nice to put them together in a way, which if you were interested in having a seminar or webinar on a particular topic, you would know how to contact. Virtual field courses are becoming more abundant and are very important, clearly, if we're dealing with COVID pandemic restrictions, if we're trying to teach field courses. And also, it's been suggested, it'd be very nice to have a facility to request to exchange or donate specimens, material, or resources. The final thing I'll say is that what we come up with must be practical for the EGU organization. And it needs to be sustainable. It shouldn't just be something that starts for one year and then peters out. So we're looking for ideas and initiatives that will carry on. And to do that, we need community consultation, which we've managed to continue a little bit during the pandemic shutdown. But also, we need the community to engage with us, people to organize these workshops and so forth. And I will stop there. And I think I should. Well, many thanks, Gordon. You've certainly outlined the challenges there, because we definitely have some challenges. But these are important responses. And as Gordon has said, we're starting off, we haven't done too much in this area so far. And so we've got a lot to do. But we're moving in the right direction. We hope you all agree. So I'm now going to share my screen for the final time. And so many thanks, Gordon, for that outline. We also do things for informal Geoscience teachers. We've mentioned that already. And I'm going to. But sadly, the plans we have for that also has been affected by coronavirus. And if you want to join the growing group of Geoscience Educational Researchers, then we have a LinkedIn group that you can link to shown on the screen there. So in summary, doing what we said would do of promoting and supporting Geoscience education at all levels across Europe and beyond. This is a massive task. And this is particularly big when the Geoscience curriculum is patchy across Europe. School teachers are poorly trained. Their resources are moderate. And they're poorly supported. But I'd like to think that our strategy is already being successful in reaching hundreds of people per year. The feedback that we're getting on all these areas is very impressive indeed. And we've got the potential to reach thousands of people in future. So those people who've got strong backgrounds, what can they do? Well, if you look on the web address that you can see on the screen there, you can find videos of all the past workshops and the brochures and the PowerPoints link with those. So you can find that information there. We're developing a website for the European chapter, as I speak. If you're interested in the syllabus, that's where you can find it in the textbook. Earth Learning Idea is there. And if you want to contact the field officer network and somebody's already in the chat said they'd like to do that and contact Eugenia, then you can do that through the website here. And if you want to contribute particularly to the work that Gordon and his colleagues are doing on higher education, this is the email address to connect to. In forward Geoscience education, again, it's the field offices you need to contact. And again, there's the LinkedIn group at the bottom there. So we hope that gives you a flavor of what the challenges are and how the committee is beginning to rise to those challenges. And we're absolutely thrilled that so many people are interested in our work and have joined this webinar today and was trying to answer the questions. But whether or not we've managed to do that, can we encourage you to interact with us in the future to continue the work you're doing for education, wherever you are, because with these big challenges, we need lots of people to meet those challenges and we need to have vision and we need to have support for what we're doing. And we're sure that that's what you are playing to provide. So thank you very much for being with us today and I'm going to hand back to Chloe now. Sure. Yeah, so I muted myself. Thank you very much to all of our speakers for their wonderful presentations today. I will just say that a couple of people are asking me for different links and I will actually get in touch with Chris after the webinar's finished today and make sure that we include all of those links in a follow-up email tomorrow. So you will receive it tomorrow. Just make sure you check the email, save those links, join the LinkedIn group, all of that kind of stuff. Now, if you do have any questions, just for the last five minutes, please do put them in the Q&A box. I actually have a couple of my own questions that I'm going to start with. We will only do five minutes of questions, so do get your questions in if you would like to. My first question is actually about the Education Committee itself because a lot of the people listening today might not even know that the Edu has these committees. There's multiple committees. The Education Committee is just one. If someone was to join the Education Committee or would like to join the Education Committee, how would they go about doing that? And what are the types of activities that the Education Committee actually does? Like how often do you meet up? How high is the workload if you're on the Education Committee? So I think I'll throw that question to Chris, but if Gina or Gordon want to jump in as well, feel free. Okay, well, how do you join the committee? Well, the three-year terms of office and the committee is full at the moment, but as people leave, we will be advertising places on the committee and anybody can apply and we select people on the best qualifications that they have. So people who are interested should send us an email and we can log that and take that into account for the next time we need new members for the committee. The workload is variable. Some members are highly active and do an awful lot of work, for example, organizing the gift workshop is a very intensive process that a number of us are involved in in different parts of the world. You know, you can see how busy the field offices are from what Gina said and Gordon is a member of the committee and he's been very involved, as you can see in the whole higher education field. So it's variable, but that can be adjusted as people want to contribute. I think that answers the questions. Very well, thank you. So just one for Gina now. So I'll be about how you personally got involved and became a field officer. How did you first hear about the opportunity? Yeah, if you just want to give a bit of details on that for anyone who might want to become a field officer, for example, like what was your experience actually getting involved? So you're just on mute still. Yeah. So I know I received a call from an energy committee on education member to invite me to apply that call. And I am a person that enjoy all challenge. So I applied, then I receive a mail from Chris said that I was selected. So it is a good opportunity huge challenge. Work with international people from different regions of the world, Europe and beyond Europe. And it is a very enrichment experience. Yeah. So to be a field officer, you need to see the news from the EGU, Committee on Education, and wait for new calls. Right, Chris? That's right. Absolutely right. Yes, yes, yes. I'm putting my thumbs up. Okay, great. And then just one more from me to Gordon. So I wrote this one down because as you're presenting, I thought of it. And you mentioned there's some resources that will be released maybe in April, 2021, depending on how things are going. Can people contribute to these resources? Do you need any additional assistance with them? Or is that all coming from the Education Committee? No, I think that these resources that I mentioned, they're going to be prepared by the people who have won the awards. And those people will then make these resources available for download. I think we are also talking about the enormous amount of material. Chris has mentioned some of it, but we do have a vast amount of educational resources. And some of it is very, very relevant for higher education, but it's not very easily accessible if you're a lecturer in university and don't quite know where to look. So I think that one of the next steps that we're gonna take is to make this material fully available. And I would hope that would involve an invitation to anybody who's sitting on nice minerals, rocks, fossils or whatever and has other materials which are a use in education will actually get involved in the process at that stage, either as an exchange or donation or whatever. Yeah, okay, great. So we do just have one final question from actually one of the attendees who mentions the geo parks, how it will start and how they can get information on this fantastic topic. Okay. Well, our field offices, and as you've heard, there are six of them so far. Unfortunately, we couldn't train the next six at the General Assembly because of COVID but there will be, in the future, there'll be 12 across Europe and then that will increase. Each one of those has been trained in giving workshops to the volunteers and the officials working in geo parks. And Gina is one of those. So if you're interested in getting those workshops and you're in one of the countries where we currently had a field officer, then please contact us and they will be thrilled as soon as COVID is over to come and provide a workshop. And the feedback we've had on the workshops we've provided so far at geo parks has been, you won't be surprised to hear, very, very, very positive indeed. Okay, fantastic. Okay, so thanks again to our fantastic speakers today. To all of the attendees that follow up email with all of the links mentioned today, we'll go out tomorrow so make sure you check that. The recording of this webinar will also go online this time next week. So if you wanna share this webinar with anyone else, it will be on the EGU's YouTube channel this time next week at the latest. And it will be a slightly edited version so any sort of like slow bits will be taken out and all that kind of thing. Thank you very much for participating and we hope to see you all next time.