Ukrainian-Bavarian Conference on Digital Education 

All Fotos by: Jonas Würdinger

From 23 to 24 June, the University of Bayreuth's Continuing Education Centre for Higher Education, the Bavarian Higher Education Centre for Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe (BAYHOST) and the Office of the Free State of Bavaria in Ukraine organised a Ukrainian-Bavarian Conference on Digital Education.

Teachers, researchers and university managers from Ukraine who are currently in Bavaria were able to participate in person, while online participation was made possible for colleagues in Ukraine. In addition, Ukrainian guests from Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK travelled especially for the conference.

Digital teaching has experienced an unexpected boost due to the pandemic in Bavaria as well as in Ukraine. For Ukraine, digital teaching has gained an additional existential importance due to the war, as teaching at universities and schools is mainly maintained online.

The conference aimed to provide knowledge about modern IT concepts and tools in education and to enable an exchange of experiences about them. The University of Bayreuth is advancing the German-Ukrainian exchange on the digitalisation of teaching-learning processes with two projects. The DAAD-funded Learnopolis+ project is working with partners in Lviv, Ternopil and Vinnytsia (Donetsk) to develop Massive Open Online Courses for the continuing education of university teachers. The framework for this is UTTERLY (Erasmus+ KA2), which establishes uniform competence standards, curricula and certification processes in this area.

The programme also included the reception of the annual scholarship holders of the Free State of Bavaria from ten countries in Eastern Europe, who reported on their experiences with pandemic-related online teaching in Bavaria and in their home countries.

On the second day of the conference, the participants exchanged ideas in small groups on concepts and instruments of digital education. The topics covered a broad spectrum, including the incorporation of games, online labs, online project work and the right way to deal with learners who are not keeping up well with the group.

With the conference, the organisers also want to contribute to the integration of the Ukrainian academics who have come to Bavaria.

With over 100 participants - 30 of them online - the conference was very well received despite the difficult conditions.