 Hello, and welcome to what I'm sure will be an enlightening and very timely conversation. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, our many partners in the country have been forced to execute a massive education paradigm shift, in which online education becomes the safest and in many cases, the only form of education. Today, we are sitting down with Dmitry Zavgorodnyi, Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Education and Science for Digital Development, Digital Transformations, and Digitalization, to understand how Ukrainians are using edX's learning content and open-source technology to continue serving its most vulnerable citizens. Today, I'm excited to speak with Deputy Minister Zavgorodnyi about three things. One, the challenges they are facing with education continuity amid the crisis. Second, how he and his team are solving these challenges with online and digital technologies. And third, what results they're seeing using these technologies. So let's get started. Welcome, Deputy Minister Zavgorodnyi. And before we get to the meat of the conversation, can I ask you how you and your family are doing, Minister? So we have very tough times. Last year was, I think, the hardest in our lifetime. But we are all here in the country, in Kiev. Some of my family members went out from Kiev for several months. Some even went out from the country, but then came back. So for us, right now, it is more or less fine. That is very good to hear. Our thoughts and prayers are with you, your family, and all of your country. These are very difficult times for Ukraine and for the world. My first question for you is, how has the Russian invasion challenged your education system? I just want to understand some of the challenges that such an invasion poses on your education system. I can describe the biggest challenge that we have is that we are trying to manage educational system, which is now in very different circumstances in the different parts of the country. So first of all, we have more or less common Western part of Ukraine, which works as just simple offline learning, but with some additional safety requirements. For instance, they need to have shelters, they need to be properly equipped, and so on. We have territories which are near the borders, or territories which are more or less near the frontline, which could feel the war in the air, where it is dangerous when the sirens are, and so on. Many people from these areas fled their regions and are temporarily displaced inside the country, or even refugees in other countries. In these areas, mostly online learning occurs. There are areas which are like a combat zone areas, and unfortunately, children are also there. There are a lot of children all over the country who are internally displaced, who left their homes in cities, and in some cases they understand that they are not going to come back to cities which are ruined completely, like Bakhmuto, Mariupol, or others. So they are trying to find new lives, new schools, and other things. It is the same with all the educational system, not only children or parents, teachers with their peers and their colleagues are also displaced all over the country, trying to settle down, but still trying to provide online education for their children, and so on. We have temporary occupied territories, and many children are still there right now, and many of them are willing to have Ukrainian language courses, or just to be connected to their friends, or to Ukrainian education. And last but not least, we have around a million children who are now not in Ukraine, so they are in the European Union, in the US, in many other countries all around the world. They are still trying to be connected to their schools, and we want them to be connected to Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian literature, and language, for them to have the possibility to come back to the country to reintegrate in the future, and so on. So definitely managing these very different circumstances is like when you have, I don't know, a multi-product company, which should work with very different solutions for a very different audience. And we cannot focus just on one, because all these audiences are important for us as for a government, obviously. So I think this is the biggest challenge. It's a monumental challenge, and it's amazing to hear how it's very different, both in the front lines and in occupied regions. But the same challenges exist in the peaceful regions. In the front lines and occupied regions, it looks like your schools are the first target of the enemy. But that is shocking for me to hear, why are schools the first target of the enemy to be destroyed? I don't think that the schools are the first target, if we're talking about the missiles, definitely the first target would be military objects or something like this. Still, we see that missiles are not targeting correct objects, or they are not so precise as they want it to be. So we saw that the missiles that hit Lviv, which is the biggest city in the western part of the country, relatively safe with the millions of people who came there from all over the country and living right now, and so on, the missile hit in the building that is the university building. So it was not any military object or military target, this was the university building. It was hit during the night when people were sleeping there. In the western part of the country, people are not getting up when the siren is on and moving to the shelter. They haven't been in the front line and so on. But yeah, it is like this. Still, in Ukraine we have more than 3,000 different educational institutions damaged or destroyed during the war. Most of them really are in the eastern part of the country and on the deoccupied territories that we have assessed. So while the battle is on the ground, not like in the air, any potential buildings could become a target. Also, Russians are sitting in this building and using it as a basis for troops and so on. This is part of also the Soviet system of doing the war because these buildings are quite big enough. They have these underground floors and so on. They are suitable for storing munitions and storing troops there. As you saw, schools work as sort of logistical support centers in these cases. But even in the interior zones where you are still seeing cruise missiles flying overhead and so on, do all of the schools inside have bomb shelters that students can go take shelter in during an emergency or how does that work? Yeah, it is required for any educational institution to have a shelter if they want to work offline. So there are requirements for how many square meters per child they should have in their shelter and some requirements for how they should manage the shelter and what are the safety measures and so on. For instance, they should have water. They should have separate doors from different sides of the shelter to have an emergency exit and other things, air conditioning and so on. So if they want to open school for, I don't know, even the part of their school children, they need to have a shelter. Unfortunately, not all the shelters are big enough to contain all the school children if the school is quite big, for instance, a thousand. In these cases, they are working in the blended way. For instance, part of the children are learning on Monday and Tuesday and others on another days. Or they are separating the groups for evening school and morning school. I see. So this challenge is because the bomb shelters may not be big enough or many schools may not have it. It is just not feasible, I guess, for everyone to come in. And I think the magnitude of the problem is even bigger than I thought in that as the students and refugees are displaced all over the world, it's not just during the crisis that even longer term, there's going to be a big issue with how do you bring education to people that have become refugees? Or how do you bring education to people in occupied territories where there might be a different kind of ideology being taught with different features and so on. So it's a really big issue. So how do you address these challenges and preserve continuity? As the Deputy Minister for Education and Digitalization, it's interesting you have both Digitalization and Education in your title. So in some sense it makes you the perfect person to be thinking about how you can use digital. But let me ask you this question. How do you address these challenges to preserve education continuity for these children? Yes. First of all, I would like to say that the COVID pandemic prepared us for something. So we learned from this period of time. We began to develop our systems for distance learning during this period. We have introduced online learning to all our schools through the year of the pandemic and we have built a platform based on open edX functionality as a massive online courses platform for our school children to be able to learn online using these courses with tests, with PDF version of books, with a lot of videos covering all the curriculum for the secondary school and so on. So now we are still continuously putting more content on the platform. But this is like the basis for online learning right now. Also our schools learned a lot on how to use an additional software during the pandemic. And now we are just trying to scale up the process of the digital transformation. So definitely when we are talking about children who are abroad or on the occupied territories, this is not the same distance learning as it is right now in the country. So I would like to start with numbers. So for now we have 4 million children in our school system. 1.5 million children are those who are learning completely online from the beginning of the war. So more than a year they are learning completely online. But also more than a million children are learning in a blended way. It means that around a million children are having online classes. So more than half of all school children in Ukraine are having online classes once per week or they have only online classes available for a year in different ways in different regions. Around half a million from these children are those who are outside of the country. Somewhere like in the European Union and in other countries. Those who are in the European Union obligatory they need to go to schools in other countries. But so we lost let's say connection with several hundred thousand of school children. It were more before the war in our system. But this half a million stays connected. So schools are providing different opportunities for them. For instance to learn only like specific subjects like Ukrainian history, Ukrainian language, have some consultations and so on. There are many schools in Ukraine which transformed to distance learning schools, private ones, public ones, different types that are providing the special services for children who are outside of Ukraine to stay connected. We even have some special school only for children who are outside of the country. Also like to be provided with some specific courses. We are also trying to consult with all the ministries of education all around the world for them to get Ukrainian teachers on board to their schools and if there are refugees to provide them with offline opportunities to learn at least Ukrainian language and history. Which seems to be the most important like cultural link to our country. Which is super important for us. We also are providing all of them with information about all the platforms that we have that could work both with the teacher as a manager of the educational process but also without the teacher. It was our main goal when we started to develop all this platform to start this platform as some product which could work without the teacher at all to provide it for children wherever they are in different time zones in different circumstances on occupied territory or not and so on because we understand that there are many different circumstances. And now we are putting on top of this many features for teachers for them to be able to stay connected with their children using these platforms. For instance like many companies are helping us during this process and I truly believe that it would not be possible without another countries and especially another like big corporations that are helping us. So one of the main things for our teachers to stay connected is to have devices. Unfortunately before the war not all the teachers in Ukraine had their own laptops and many teachers that fled occupied territories lost everything. Both devices and also like their homes and everything. So we needed and we still need to provide teachers with their devices with laptops to stay connected and to provide distance learning for this millions of children and for instance Google has donated more than 50,000 Chromebooks for Ukrainian teachers. HP has donated around 40,000 laptops for our school children for our teachers, I'm sorry. And now we are getting more and more devices for our school children for the vulnerable groups in the areas where the distance learning still prevails. So this is an example where the companies step in and helped us with an infrastructure and then when we provided this with them with devices we started a lot of additional courses on how to use the distance learning tools how to use software and everything else properly. And during the war and this awesome numbers during the war we already have more than 150,000 teachers certified by for instance Google and additional tens of thousands with Microsoft certification on how to use the technology for distance learning. So I think that this collaborative approach with the companies is also the way of doing things because you cannot manage such numbers in these different circumstances by the ministry management or by any kind of small centralized management. Of course, it's great to hear that companies big and small are stepping in I've also heard of smaller companies like Raccoon Gang and others who are helping build a lot of this infrastructure Are the issues that you're seeing similar at the college level or are there different sort of issues for the college and skilling levels? Of course there are differences between the different age groups and also between the different specializations. So the easiest, it was not easy I'm sorry for the world for the world but from all our products I think that the easiest was the first one which we developed during the pandemic for the secondary school because we then thought that it would be much harder for us to develop the product for primary school and we would rather start pushing our schools to work offline at least partially for primary school children. Unfortunately, war is much, much worse than the pandemic, any pandemic I think and it is impossible to learn offline and to stay connected even for primary school children. So we started to develop products for them. Now we have several products and one of those is a country to learn app which was developed by our Netherlands partners and NGOs from all around the world. This app was already in place in several countries so we developed the content, localized it, started to develop new features and now we are getting this even better but this is the app where children can learn how to read and write and basic math and everything else and we will put new additional content there. It was harder than to develop online courses for general subjects. It is even harder to develop courses for for instance vocational education because in comparison to schools where we have around 17, maybe 20 different subjects in professional education we have 300 different professions and many of these professions could not possibly be taught using online learning. How do you provide hands-on stuff? We need to work offline to have this hands-on experience with an equipment and everything else. So it was very hard for our institutions and for our local governments to understand that even in toughest circumstances they need their institutions to provide at least partially offline learning even in the dangerous areas or to evacuate those children to be able to learn and to have this practical experience in other regions. So it was very challenging. For our universities also pandemic brought a lot of experience to them and now we are pushing them further and further to make this digital transformation possible. I think that the biggest challenge in higher educational institutions is that they need not only to provide distance classes as they are doing right now still having the similar structure of their lessons, similar lectures and everything else but to understand that it is something that could change their approaches not only having this digital environment around them but also reshaping the curriculum around this environment using online courses and everything else. And for this purpose we discussed with all the massive online courses platform that we know both edX and Coursera and Udemy and many others like Labster and LabExchange and many others and they all provided our universities with the access for students for free to be able to get this online courses. Then we immediately set up new legislation for universities after the results of the certification from online courses just having the exams. So now our universities are widely using the platforms and contents from all the platforms just to provide it to their students as a proper alternative for their lectures but still the difficulties I think is in their minds and approaches so not only to transform the lectures from offline to online but for instance to say that we do not need lectures you have online courses please come up to like teamwork or something like this. Exactly, I think there's a whole new way of teaching when you teach online you don't have to have one-hour lectures with offline education you need one-hour lectures because you're bringing everybody to a classroom and you're dividing the classes into one-hour slots so you can multiplex between multiple classes so you have one-hour lectures but online you can have short videos with exercises interspersed all kinds of new ways of doing things and online brings up other challenges like how do you do testing so for example following the cancellation of the 3-HO assessment in Ukraine which assessed 200,000 school graduates to determine higher ed funding the Ukrainian government pivoted to open edX and developed the national multi-subject testing platform the NMT which can support 20,000 students concurrently and it also allows students to pause testing countdowns and seek shelter during emergencies and so it successfully launched in July and has been serving students in Ukraine and 32 countries around the world to which refugees migrated can you give us an update on how this test is going across various countries the scale of this exam and how quickly you did it is such an incredible lesson for everybody so tell us about the test yes so first lesson that we can say from this experience everything is possible because we thought that it would be a disaster so we have our national exams which were paper-based exams usually in June and July each year so the war began in the end of February 2022 the full-scale invasion and then in several months we were already discussing what should we do with these exams because we understood that there are reasons to believe that it will be impossible to hold these exams should we cancel this where would these children then enter the universities how should we make it possible and so on generally speaking in Ukraine these exams the external final examination for schools is one of the best reforms in education from the previous past years and it is because all the children in the country from the rural areas, villages, big cities they have similar possibilities to enter the best university in Ukraine because only the results of this exam matters and we truly believe that we need to provide similar opportunities for everybody in the country so we started to think what should we do because of these air alarms, missiles, war and displacement of children and refugees all around the world and so on so we come up with an idea that first of all we should not have this exam simultaneously done by all like 300,000 schoolchildren the second idea was that we do not need to have exams for each and every subject separately and we would start with the multidisciplinary just one multidisciplinary test but we will have many variations of this test for our children to have this test like 15,000 per day then if something went wrong for instance air alarm and children need to go to shelter or I don't know any other purpose they would have additional like 10 different possibilities to pass the test in the further days also we decided that the test should be not paper based because it was literally impossible to hold the paper based examination all around the world in many different countries to deliver the tests there and for nobody to not to open the to get the questions before the test so we decided to set up the system then we have some time I think it was like during one week when we discussed it with many different countries and the ministries of education and the centers of quality of education from France, Italy, Germany, other countries UNESCO and many international organizations who are involved in such testing all over the world and we compared the possibilities of using some systems that were in place and so on but because of the war circumstances and all this air alarms different settings that we need because of the war different country management and everything else it was very hard for our international partners to set up the system as flexible as we need and as soon as we needed so we decided to go further with an open edX which we were familiar with because we had another testing in place already and just to cover this topic in Ukraine if you want to become a civil servant you need to pass a Ukrainian language independent test and this test is held by the special committee on Ukrainian language which is also online based test and we used an open edX platform to provide the committee with the testing tool so this was something that we had already and we started on top of this with the technical requirements for this Ukrainian language examination and then build a multidisciplinary test we held it in 30 different countries in 50 different cities all around the world simultaneously for 15 times during July 2022 during like the full scale war and 200,000 school children passed this test and this year we have done it one more time and this year we will also do this for those who are going to enter the master's degree because in our legislation they also need to pass some tests to go there and also the final examination for master's degree will be also done using the platform using the software tool Minister Zavgorodny, congratulations to you if I take away three words from this conversation it will be that nothing is impossible and you have certainly proved to the world that nothing is really impossible when you put your mind to it I do remember in 1977 in India we too had a nationwide exam it was called a JEE joint entrance exam for all of the IITs in those days about 300,000 students took the exam and today I hear 1 to 2 million students take that exam simultaneously and that one exam determines the entry to many of the engineering colleges and I can imagine the numbers are so large and that you were able to pivot to online and in your case you actually have to do it not just in Ukraine but over 30 countries so again this is absolutely incredible this is moving to a digitalization literally at a war footing so congratulations again for some of this project in our lives all the team members believe that it was like totally number one this is absolutely incredible as I think to the US now in July and in the US millions of college students are preparing to return to classrooms in about a month and a half can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like in Ukraine how that will look like what are you hearing from the colleges and educators and learners on the ground as you know the time for the new semester approaches yeah so the first thing that we are trying to work on the first goal is to have as many children connected to offline learning as possible by connected to offline learning I mean even the blended way of learning when they have an opportunity to work offline with their peers at least once or twice per week because of the safety measures and other things so we need to get them out from their homes to stay connected to socialize to work with their teachers and peers in schools, colleges, universities and so on this is our first goal we are measuring this by the amount of children that would be connected or just lowering the amount of children on fully online learning the second goal is to provide those who are not able to work offline with the proper distance learning opportunities to provide them with devices to prepare new digital content electronic textbooks and other things and paper-based textbooks are also super important thing for distance learning we learned it from this period because when the war started the whole government spending on capital expenditures they all were suspended and put only for the military so all the books that needed to be procured for school children also hadn't been published at all and we understood that this one was one of the biggest challenges for these children through the war because even if they have online tools and devices and everything else there are problems in connectivity electricity and other supplies so books are very reliable assets to be connected to learning and parents could provide a lot of support when they have proper textbooks so this is also I believe the part of the distance learning to have these textbooks in hands of children and students so yes we are trying to prepare for the next school year in these two areas I think these are the most important as a tactical one still we have a lot of strategic developments we are already thinking about what kind of changes should be implemented in our testing tool that you asked about for the next testing year and what are the potential frauds that we learned from this testing season what should we change for the next one how should we implement it in other countries for the next years and so on but on the tactical level more children to stay connected to be able to learn offline and much more quality to distance learning Minister Dimitri Zavgorodny this is just so fascinating to hear you talk about all of the digitalization work so my last question for you will be a more personal one can you tell us what continues to motivate you as you lead this work in your country yeah it is very easy so I believe that there are many people who are in the field of education because they believe that they could possibly touch the feeling of catching children or something like this similar to this so when we are talking about big numbers it's also the motivating part when you are discussing the delivery of 50,000 Chromebooks for teachers with Google and UNICEF and UNESCO and some governments and so on this is kind of a motivating part but then there was a project when we discussed with a company that they are giving as a gift not to our schools but personally to teachers like a hundred or several hundred laptops but we decided to give it to teachers from Mariupol so there were like a hundred teachers that left their city that saw the city like burn to the ground without like any hope to come back to see their homes and so on and we were able to provide them with something some hope to find a new job, a new place to live and have this connection with this device to their opportunities and something like this so this was something that I felt that this was super important or another thing that motivates me that I travel a lot like during this month I was in Zaporizhia which is like 50 km near the front line, the big city with several hundred thousand citizens and a hundred thousand kids in the city in Krivarych which was, I don't know 50 km from the front line for a year or something like this very damaged city I was in the western part of the country in Dnipro where you can see the buildings damaged and this terrible disasters with the civilian buildings and a lot of casualties and so on and I spent the night in this city I heard air alarms and air strikes during the night and so on and this motivates me when you come to this city you met people that are living there and you are asking them like how are you they say we are here we are like waiting for the victory we are working right now for our children we have hundreds of children here right now we work with them we will live in our city we will be victorious or something like this or I saw people that moved from occupied Militopol to Zaporizhia and they are still like near the front line they evacuated from occupation they were there for some period of time they know how it is they saw their educational institutions destroyed or occupied by the military forces and so on and now they are working in Zaporizhia not in another country and they said we are expecting our military to liberate our city because we want to come back home and like this is super motivation for me to work more to help them because I think that these are people like made from something very cool and important you know and I want to help these people you know just as you say ministers Avgorodny the people you see in the front line areas and the destroyed buildings and all of them motivating you your work is so inspiring and so motivational for the rest of us in terms of what we are doing with education and teaching and development and your words nothing is impossible just truly amazing I think those will serve as a beacon and guiding post to all of us and the ministry tells me this is oh it's too hard to do this we don't have enough time I'm going to quote you ministers Avgorodny that look this is what Ukraine and their ministry did in the time of necessity they talk about necessity is the mother of invention and when nothing is impossible you can truly get amazing things done so thank you for joining me and sharing some of your thoughts and insights on how you have digitalized all of education in Ukraine from the primary school level all the way to colleges and done it in a way that not only scales but provides quality as well so thank you again for joining me and I wish you all the best and I hope for your safety and a few of your family and the entire team and country thank you again thank you very much last year was I think the hardest in our lifetime but we are all here in the country in Kiev some of my family members went out from Kiev for several months some even went out from the country but then came back so for us right now it is more or less fine that is very good to hear our thoughts and prayers are with you, your family and all of your country these are very difficult times for Ukraine and for the world my first question for you is how has the Russian invasion challenged your education system to understand some of the challenges that such an invasion opposes on your education system so I think that I can describe the biggest challenge that we have is that we are trying to manage educational system which is now in very different circumstances in the different parts of the country so first of all we have more or less common western part of Ukraine which works as just simple offline learning but with some additional safety requirements for instance they need to have shelters they need to be properly equipped and so on we have territories which are near the borders or territories which are more or less near the front line which could feel the war in the air which can where it is dangerous when the sirens are and so on people from this area flat their regions and are temporarily displaced inside the country or even refugees in other countries in this area mostly online online learning occurs there are areas which are like a combat zone areas and unfortunately children are also there there are a lot of children all over the country who are internally displaced they are homes and cities and in some cases they understand that they are not going to come back to cities which are ruined completely like Bakhmut or Mariupol or others so they are trying to find new lives new schools and other things it is the same with all the educational system not only children or parents teachers with their peers and their colleagues who are also displaced all over the country trying to settle down but still trying to provide online education for their children and so on we have temporary occupied territories and many children are still there right now and many of them are willing to have Ukrainian language courses or just to be connected to their friends or to Ukrainian education and last but not least we have around a million children who are now not in Ukraine so they are in the European Union in the US and many other countries all around the world they are still trying to be connected to their schools and we want them to be connected to Ukrainian culture Ukrainian literature and language for them to have the possibility to come back to the country to reintegrate in the future and so on so definitely managing this very different I don't know, multi-product company which should work with very different solutions for their very different audience and we cannot focus just on one because all of these audiences are important for us as for a government obviously so I think this is the biggest challenge it's a monumental challenge and it's very it's amazing to hear how it's very different both in the front lines and in occupied regions but the same challenges exist in the peaceful regions in the front lines and occupied regions it looks like your schools are the first target of the enemy that is shocking for me to hear why are schools the first target of the enemy to be destroyed I don't think that the schools are like the first target if we are talking about the missiles definitely the first target would be military objects or something like this still we see that missiles are not targeting correct objects or they are not so precise as they want it to be we saw that the missiles that hit Lviv which is the biggest city in the western part of the country relatively safe with the millions of people who came there from all over the country right now and so on the missile hit in the building that is the university building so it was not any military or object or military target this was the university building it was hit during the night when people were sleeping there in the western part of the country people are not like getting up when the siren is on and moving to the shelter they haven't been like in the front line and so on but that it is like this still in Ukraine we have more than 3,000 different educational institutions damaged or destroyed during the war most of them really are in the eastern part of the country and on the de-occupied territories that we have assessed so while the battle is on the ground not like in the air any potential buildings could become a target also russians are like sitting in this building and using it as a basis for troops and so on this is part of also the Soviet system of doing the war because these buildings are quite big enough they have this underground floors and so on they are suitable for storing munitions and storing troops there I see so schools work as sort of logistical support centers in these cases but even in the interior zones where you are still seeing cruise missiles flying overhead and so on do all of the schools inside have bomb shelters that students can go take shelter in during an emergency or how does that work it is required for any educational institution to have a shelter if they want to work offline there are requirements for how many square meters per child they should have in their shelter and some requirements for how they should manage the shelter and what are the safety measures and so on for instance they should have water they should have separate doors from different sides of the shelter to have an emergency exit and other things air conditioning and so on so if they want to open school for even the part of their school children they need to have shelter unfortunately not all the shelters are big enough to contain all the school children if the school is quite big for instance a thousand in these cases they are working in the blended way for instance part of the children are learning on Monday and Tuesday and others on another days or they are separating the groups for evening school and morning school I see so this challenges because the bomb shelters may not be big enough for many schools may not have it it is just not feasible I guess for everyone to come in and I think the magnitude of the problem is even bigger than I thought in that as the students and refugees are displaced all over the world it's not just during the crisis there's going to be a big issue with how do you bring education to people that have become refugees or how do you bring education to people in occupied territories where there might be a different kind of ideology being taught with different teachers and so on it's a really big issue so how do you address these challenges and preserve continuity as the deputy minister for education and digitalization it's interesting you have both digitalization and education in your title so in some sense it makes you the perfect person to be thinking about how you can use digital but let me ask you this question how do you address these challenges to preserve education continuity for these children first of all I would like to say that the Covid pandemic scared us for something so we learned from this from this period of time we began to develop our systems for distance learning during this period we have introduced online learning to all our schools through the year of the pandemic and we have built the platform based on open edX functionality as a massive online courses platform for our school for children to be able to learn online using these courses with tests, with pdf version of books, with a lot of videos covering all the curriculum for the secondary school and so on so now we are still continuously putting more content on the platform but this is like the basis for online learning right now also our schools learned a lot on how to use an additional software during the pandemic and now we are just trying to scale up the process of the digital transformation so definitely when we are talking about children who are abroad or on the occupied territories this is not the same distance learning as it is right now in the country so I would like to start with numbers so inside the for now we have 4 million children in our school system 1.5 million children are those who are learning completely online from the beginning of the war so more than a year they are learning completely online but also more than a million children are learning in a blended way it means that around a million children are having online classes so more than half of all school children in Ukraine are having online classes once per week or they have only online classes available for a year in different ways in different regions around half a million from these children are those who are outside of the country somewhere like in the European Union in other countries those who are in the European Union obligatory they need to go to schools in other countries we lost connection with several hundred thousand of school children it were more before the war in our system but this half a million stays connected so schools are providing different opportunities for them for instance to learn only specific subjects like Ukrainian history Ukrainian language have some consultations and so on there are many schools in Ukraine which transformed to distance learning schools private ones public ones different types that are providing the special services for children who are outside of Ukraine to stay connected we even have some special school only for children who are outside of the country also like to be provided some specific courses we are also trying to consult with all the ministries of education all around the world for them to get Ukrainian teachers on board to their schools and if there are refugees to provide them with offline opportunities to learn at least Ukrainian language and history which seems to be the most important cultural link to our country which is super important for us we also are providing all of them with information about all the platforms that we have that could work both with the teacher as a manager of the educational process but also without the teacher it was our main goal when we started to develop all this platform to start this platform as some product which could work without the teacher at all for children whatever they are in different time zones in different circumstances on occupied territory or not and so on because we understand that there are many in different circumstances and now we are putting on top of this many features for teachers for them to be able to stay connected with their children using these platforms for instance like many companies are helping us during this process it would not be possible without another countries and especially another like big corporations that are helping us so one of the main things for our teachers to stay connected is to have devices unfortunately before the war not all the teachers in Ukraine had their own laptops and many teachers that fled occupied territories lost everything both devices and also like their homes and everything so we needed and we still need to provide teachers with devices with laptops to stay connected and to provide distance learning for this millions of children and for instance Google has donated more than 50,000 Chromebooks for Ukrainian teachers HP has donated around 40,000 laptops for our school children for our teachers I'm sorry and now we are getting more and more devices for our school children for the vulnerable groups in the areas where the distance learning still prevails so this is an example where the companies step in and helped us with infrastructure and then when we provided this with them with devices we started a lot of additional courses on how to use the distance learning tools how to use software and everything else properly and during the war and these are awesome numbers during the war we already have more than 150,000 teachers certified by for instance Google and additional tens of thousands with Microsoft certification on how to use the technology for distance learning so I think that this collaborative approach with the companies is also the way of doing things because you cannot manage such numbers in these different circumstances by the ministry management or by any kind of small centralized management of course it's great to hear that companies big and small are stepping in, I've also heard of smaller companies like Raccoon, Yang and others who are helping build a lot of this infrastructure are there any issues that you are seeing similar at the college level or are there different sort of issues for the college and skilling levels of course there are differences between the different age groups and also between the different specializations so the easiest it was not easy I'm sorry for the world for the world but from all our products I think that the easiest the first one which we developed during the pandemic for the secondary school because we then thought that it would be much harder for us to develop the product for primary school and we would rather start pushing our schools to work offline at least partially for primary school children unfortunately war is much much worse than the pandemic, any pandemic I think and it is impossible to learn offline and to stay connected even for primary school children so we started to develop products for them now we have several products and one of those is a can't wait to learn app which was developed by our Netherlands partners and NGOs from all around the world this app was already in place in several countries so we developed the content localized it start to develop new features and now we are getting this even better but this is the app where children can learn how to read and write and basic math and everything else and we will put new additional content there and it was harder than to develop online courses for general subjects it is even harder to develop courses for for instance vocational education because in comparison to schools where we have around 17 maybe 20 different subjects in professional education we have 300 different professions and many of these professions could not possibly be taught using online learning to provide hands-on we need to work offline to have this hands-on experience with an equipment and everything else so it was very hard for our institutions and for our local governments to understand that even in toughest circumstances they need their institutions to provide at least partially offline learning even in the dangerous areas or to evacuate those children to be able to learn and to have this practical experience in another regions so it was very challenging for our universities also pandemic brought a lot of experience to them and now we are pushing them further and further to provide to make this digital transformation possible I think that the biggest challenge in higher educational institutions is that they need not only to provide distance classes as they are doing right now still having the similar structure of their lessons similar lectures and everything else but to understand that it is something that could change their approaches not only having this digital environment around them but also reshaping the curriculum on this environment using online courses and everything else and for this purpose we discussed with all the massive online courses platform that we know both edX and Coursera and Udemy and many others like Labster and LabExchange and many others with the access for students for free to be able to get this online courses then we immediately set up new legislation for universities to accept the results of the certification from online courses just having the exams so now our universities are widely using the platforms and contents from all the platforms just to provide it to their students as a proper alternative for their lectures but still the difficulties I think is in their minds and approaches not only to transform the lectures from offline to online but for instance to say that we do not need lectures you have online courses please come up to like teamwork or something like this exactly I think there's a whole new way of teaching when you teach online you don't have to have one-hour lectures with offline education you need one-hour lectures because you're bringing everybody to a classroom and you're dividing the classes into one-hour slots so you can multiplex between multiple classes so you have one-hour lectures but online you can have short videos with exercises interspersed all kinds of new ways of doing things and this brings up online brings up other challenges like how do you do testing so for example following the cancellation of the 3HO assessment in Ukraine which assessed 200,000 school graduates to determine higher ed funding you know the Ukrainian government pivoted to open edX and developed the national multi-subject testing platform the NMT which can support 20,000 students concurrently and it also allows students to pause testing countdowns and seek shelter during emergencies and so successfully launched in July and has been serving students in Ukraine and 32 countries around the world to which refugees migrated can you give us an update on how this test is going across various countries the scale of this exam and how quickly you did it is such an incredible lesson for everybody so tell us about the test first lesson that we can say from this experience everything is possible because we thought that it would be a disaster so we have our national exams which were paper based exams usually in June and July each year so the war began in the end of February 2022 the full-scale invasion and then in several months we were already discussing what should we do with these exams because we understood that there are reasons to believe that it will be impossible to hold these exams should we cancel this where would these children then enter the universities we made it possible and so on generally speaking in Ukraine these exams the external final examination for schools is one of the best reforms in education from the previous past years and it is because all the children in the country from the rural areas villages, big cities they have similar possibilities to enter the best university in Ukraine because only the results of this exam matters and we truly believe that we need to provide similar opportunities for everybody in the country so we started to think what should we do because of these air alarms missiles with the war and displacement of children and refugees all around the world and so on so we come up with an idea that first of all we should not have this exam simultaneously done by all like 300,000 school children the second idea was that we do not need to have exams for each and every subject separately and we would start with the multidisciplinary just one multidisciplinary test but we will have many variations of this test for our children to have this test like 15,000 per day then if something went wrong for instance air alarm and children need to go to shelter or I don't know any other purpose they would have additional like 10 different possibilities to pass the test in the further days also we decided that the test should be not paper based because it was literally impossible to hold the paper based examination all around the world in many different countries to deliver the tests there and for nobody not to open the to get the questions before the test so we decided to set up the system then we have some time I think during one week when we discussed it with many different countries and the ministries of education and the centers of quality of education from France Italy, Germany other countries UNESCO and many international organizations who are involved in such testing all over the world and we compared the possibilities of using some systems that were in place and so on but because of the war circumstances and all this in terms different settings that we need because of the war different country management and everything else it was very hard for our international partners to set up the system as flexible as we need and as soon as we needed so we decided to go further with an open edX which we were familiar with because we had already and just to cover this topic in Ukraine if you want to become a civil servant you need to pass a Ukrainian language independent test and this test is held by the special committee on Ukrainian language which is also online based test and we used an open edX platform to provide the committee with the testing tool so this was something that we had already and we started on top of this with the technical requirements for this Ukrainian language examination and then build a multidisciplinary test we held it in 30 different countries in 50 different cities all around the world simultaneously for 15 times during July 2022 during like the full scale war and 200,000 school children passed this test and this year we have done it one more time and this year we will also do this for those who are going to enter the master's degree because in our legislation they also need to pass some tests to go there and also the final examination for master's degree it will be also done using the platform using the software tool Minister Zafgorodny congratulations to you if I take away three words from this conversation it will be that nothing is impossible and you have certainly proved to the world that nothing is really impossible when you put your mind to it you know I do remember in 1977 in India we too had a nationwide exam which was called a JEE joint entrance exam for all of the IITs in those days about 300,000 students took the exam and today I hear 1 to 2 million students take that exam simultaneously and that one exam determines the entry to many of the engineering colleges and I can imagine the numbers are so large and that you were able to pivot to online and you actually had to do it not just in Ukraine but over 30 countries so again this is absolutely incredible this is moving to digitalization literally at a war footing so congratulations again for some of this project in our lives all the team members believe that it was totally number one this is absolutely incredible you know we are back to the US now in July and in the US millions of college students are preparing to return to classrooms in about a month and a half can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like in Ukraine how that will look like what are you hearing from the colleges and educators and learners on the ground you know the time for the new semester approaches yeah so the first thing that we are trying to work on the first goal is to have as many children connected to offline learning as possible by connected to offline learning I mean even the blended way of learning when they have an opportunity to work offline with their peers at least once twice per week because of the safety measures and other things so we need to get them out from their homes to stay connected to socialize, to work with their teachers and peers in schools colleges, universities and so on this is our first goal we are measuring this by the amount of children that would be connected or just lowering the amount of children that will be online learning the second goal is to provide those who are not able to work offline with the proper distance learning opportunities to provide them with devices to prepare new digital content electronic textbooks and other things and paper based textbooks are also super important thing for distance learning we learned it from this period because when the war started the whole government spending on capital expenditures they all were suspended and put only for the military so all the books that needed to be procured for school children also hadn't been published at all and we understood that this one was one of the biggest challenges for these children through the war because even if they have online tools and devices and everything else there are problems in connectivity electricity and other supplies so books are very reliable assets to be connected to learning and parents could provide a lot of support when they have proper textbooks so this is also I believe the part of the distance learning to have these textbooks in hands of children and students so yes we are trying to prepare for the next school year in these two areas I think these are the most important as a tactical one still we have a lot of strategic developments we are already thinking about what kind of changes should be implemented in our testing tool that you asked about for the next testing year and what are the potential frauds that we learned from this testing season and what should we change for the next one how should we implement it in other countries for the next years and so on but on the tactical level more children to stay connected to be able to learn offline and much more quality to distance learning the minister Dimitri Zavgorodny this is just so fascinating to hear you talk about all of the digitalization work so my last question for you will be a more personal one can you tell us what continues to motivate you as you lead this work in your country yeah it is very easy so I believe that there are many people who are in the field of education because they believe that they could possibly touch children in the right or something like this similar to this so when we are talking about big numbers it is also the motivating part when you are discussing the delivery of 50,000 Chromebooks for teachers with Google and UNICEF and UNESCO and some governments and so on this is kind of a motivating part but then there was a project when we discussed with an Acer the computer company that they are giving as a gift not to our schools but personally to teachers like a hundred or several hundred laptops but we decided to give it to teachers from Mariupol so there were like a hundred teachers that left their city that saw the city burn to the ground without any hope to come back and to see their homes and so on and we were able to provide them with something some hope to find a new job a new place to live and have this connection with this device to their opportunities and something like this so this was something that I felt that this was super important or another thing that motivates me I travel a lot like during this month I was in Zaporizhia which is like 50 km near the front line the big city with several hundred thousand citizens and the hundred thousand kids in the city in Kraviri which was 50 km from the front line for a year or something like this very damaged city was also in the western part of the country in Dnipro where you can see the buildings damaged and this terrible disaster was the civilian buildings and a lot of casualties and so on and I spent the night in this city I heard air alarms and air strikes during the night and so on and this motivates me when you come to the city you met people that are living there 50 km from the front line and you are asking them like how are you they say we are here we are like waiting for the victory we are working right now for our children we have hundreds of children here right now we work with them we will live in our city we will like be victorious or something like this or I saw people that moved from occupied Militopol to Zaporizhia and they are still like near the front line they evacuated from occupation they were there for some period of time they know how it is they saw their educational institutions destroyed or occupied by the military forces and so on and now they are working in Zaporizhia not in another country and they said we are expecting our military to liberate our city because we want to come back home and like this is super motivation for me to work more to help them because I think that these are people made from something very cool and important and I want to help these people just as you say the ministers of Gorodny the people you see in these front line areas and the destroyed buildings and all of them motivating you your work is so inspiring and so motivational for the rest of us in terms of what we are doing with education and teaching and development and your words nothing is impossible are just truly amazing I think those will serve as a beacon and guiding post to all of us where if anybody tells me oh it's too hard to do this we don't have enough time I'm going to quote you ministers of Gorodny that look this is what Ukraine and their ministry did in the time of necessity the talk about necessity is the mother of invention and when nothing is impossible you can truly get amazing things done so thank you so very much for joining me ministers of Gorodny and sharing some of your thoughts and insights on how you have digitalized all of education in Ukraine from the primary school level all the way to colleges and done it in a way that not only scales but provides quality as well so thank you again for joining me and I wish you all the best and I hope for your safety and of you and your family and the entire team and country thank you again