SAS, Osvitoria, EdEra and Other Platforms that Help Ukrainian Schoolchildren to Return to Education in Wartime Conditions
The war left millions of Ukrainian children without the opportunity to study and caused severe damage to the educational infrastructure. However, thanks to volunteer projects and philanthropists, educators are making titanic efforts to make Ukraine a country of educated people after the victory and decades after.
– The terrible figures regarding the destruction of the education system are growing daily, Novoe Vremya journalists note.
– Millions of children and teenagers with their loved ones fled Ukraine, escaping the war’s horrors. About 4 million of them completed the previous academic year online and are now taking advantage of distance education opportunities.
Journalists estimate the scale of the problem and note that the war has already turned dozens of schools and universities in our country into ruins.
But educators opened their own front – started a battle for an educated young generation.
For example, the Small Academy of Sciences of Ukraine focuses on offline educational formats in safe regions of the country and publicly available online projects. The digital platform of the SAS includes classes, lectures and meetings, the number of which reaches 30 cognitive and educational activities in an interactive format every week.
– Stanislav Dovgiy and his children, Oles and Oksana, take care of educational projects of the National Academy of Sciences, such as, for example, the Museum of Science at VDNH, which is very popular among Kyivans. Currently, the family and the National Academy of Sciences are planning similar scientific and educational centres in other currently safe large cities of western Ukraine. One has already been opened in Lviv; Chernivtsi and Uzhhorod are considering the following locations. Many children and young people are living there because of the war, – journalists report.
In one of his interviews, Oles Dovgiy promised that his family would develop science museums throughout Ukraine after the war. The SAS’s projects have international support from UNESCO and UNICEF.
The ministry also makes efforts to popularise online educational platforms; a list of them is collected and constantly updated for training, self-development, receiving help and spreading verified information. Among dozens of positions, you can find resources for learning and entertainment for the youngest children from 3 to 6 years old and many platforms for teaching older children and teenagers within the school curriculum, career guidance, and preparation for applying to higher education institutions.
The educational community is developing online projects designed to help children learn despite the war.
– Osvitoria is one of the “fronts” for saving education. Although before the war, its goal was to reform and develop school education,- the journalists remind.
– According to the organisation’s estimates, about 7 million Ukrainian children were affected in one way or another by the war and its consequences, so now the primary purpose of the platform is to help them all return to education.
Therefore, Osvitoria became an ecosystem of digital channels for children from kindergarten to 11 grade. The founder of the project Zoia Lytvyn told about the novelties that experts and the best teachers recorded new webinars for preparing for the NMT, their views reached 2 million, more than 100 thousand children prepared for the multi-test on the platform, and now the union with international partners are creating a gamified educational product – a mobile application for studying the Ukrainian language and mathematics.
Another online project is EdEra. It helps teachers and children; it is available both to those in Ukraine and those who left their homeland due to the war. “Learning here is taken quite seriously,” the authors of the review of initiatives in the field of education note.
– A course of lectures with short videos, questions and tasks for better assimilation of the material is accompanied by notes with illustrations and explanations. Students do homework and take a regular exam at the end of the course.
That is why we see the EdEra educational platform in the mentioned Ministry of Education list.
– As you can see, you can find affordable ways not to stop in development and not to interrupt your studies as every minute devoted to education contributes to the victory of Ukraine not only today but also decades after the war, – the publication emphasises.
