A core aspect of the European Digital Education Hub is the opportunities for networking and working together with other people active in digital education. Much of this interaction is done online, but there are also face-to-face community workshops three times per year. 

The latest community workshop took place in Brussels in October 2022 on the topic of Digital education in times of crises: Emergency education enablers, zooming in on the present situation in Ukraine and the discussions centred around how digital education can be used to support Ukrainian learners. The workshop had about 45 participants, of which three were from Ukraine (but now living abroad).  

The workshops started with expert input from different backgrounds and sectors: a representative from the European Commission’s School Unit talked about the displaced children from Ukraine in the EU and the Temporary Protection Directive giving them access to education in the EU. The CEO of the NGO SPARK talked about what NGOs do in war-torn areas such as Ukraine and another European Commission representative talked about skills, qualifications and recognition of Ukrainian refugees in the EU. The latter included initiatives such as the translation in Ukrainian of the EU Skills Profiling Tool and the initiative on recognition of qualifications for third-country nationals.  This gave the participants a good overview of what has been accomplished in different parts of the continent and what challenges are still there. 

The next part of the workshop was more interactive, and the participants discussed what needs to be done now in order to improve the situation. In small groups, they came up with recommendations on what should be done now: on European level, on national level, in school education, in higher education, etc. These recommendations will now be taken up by a working group (“squad”), consisting of 20 motivated participants who will turn the recommendations into concrete action points.  

The last part of the workshop included a policy dialogue in which representatives from the European Commission, the Czech Presidency and the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine discussed the way forward. The participants were moved by the statements from the Ukrainian representative, who talked very emotionally and with concrete examples about what has been done to the education system in Ukraine: school buildings bombed to pieces, millions of displaced young people, power blackouts and other challenges making digital/hybrid education a necessity.  

Similarly to the first community workshop in Tallinn, the fact that the participants had very diverse backgrounds was appreciated. One of the participants pointed out: “This is the first time I've participated in a community workshop and I am really happy that I had a chance to discuss different topics and meet people from different areas and see different points of view.” 

Pictures, presentations and background documents from the workshop are available on the Hub.