UNESCO-EBU Workshop on educational broadcasting in the Arab States

At a time when 87% of the world’s student population is affected by COVID-19 school closures, UNESCO is launching a Global Education Coalition to support countries in scaling up their best distance learning practices and reaching children and youth who are most at risk. Since closing schools to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have been deploying distance learning solutions and grappling with the complexity of provisioning education remotely, from delivering content and supporting teachers to providing guidance to families and addressing connectivity challenges. Equity is the paramount concern because closures disproportionately hurt vulnerable and disadvantaged students who rely on schools for a range of social services, including health and nutrition.

The Coalition, which the EBU is also part of, aims to:

• Help countries in mobilizing resources and implementing innovative and context-appropriate solutions to provide education remotely, leveraging hi-tech, low-tech and no-tech approaches
• Seek equitable solutions and universal access
• Ensure coordinated responses and avoid overlapping efforts
• Facilitate the return of students to school when they reopen to avoid an upsurge in dropout rates

To support these goals, EBU and UNESCO are organizing a series of virtual workshops on educational broadcasting where EBU Members share their experience with a global audience, give hands-on information on how they managed to set up educational programmes for television, radio and online in a very short time, if and how they worked with ministries of education and teachers and how they make an educational programme interesting so that their audience stays tuned in. This workshop is addressed to Arabic-speaking countries and audiences.

The objectives of the virtual workshop for the Arab region are to facilitate knowledge sharing, exchange best practices in the development of educational audiovisuals, and share regional challenges and opportunities of using TV and radio in distance learning in order to strengthen collaboration between educational content developers and audiovisual specialists. At the end of the virtual workshop, participants will acquire:

• A better understanding of strategies and key elements necessary to develop and implement quality audiovisual programmes
• Knowledge to enter into and sustain strong partnerships between educational content developers and audiovisual specialists

The following speakers will share their experience:

• Nicola Frank, Head of Institutional and International Relations, EBU
• Robert Fortuijn, Channel Manager, NPO

After the workshop, meeting notes and video recording can be found here.

For more information, please contact Nicola Frank or Madiana Asseraf-Jacob.

Register for the workshop: 
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_XAEhVWLLT4Wd7CTo8vrvxA
(password 797409)

Or watch the live transmission on YouTube