How teachers are using this MOOC

Transforming Education in Challenging Environments (Educators for Change in Arabic) ran for the first time in June of 2019. Since then we have kept in contact with participants to see what they have done with what they learnt. In this video we present two of these participants.

Mariam and Léa were able to put into practice the knowledge that they gained from this course in order to benefit the learning community that they are in. Mariam is an Operations Manager at Thaki, an organization that provides laptops with educational content to schools in Lebanon that host refugee students. She said that the MOOC helped her recognize the challenges that teachers face with students in the context of displacement. This knowledge helped her reach out to them more effectively by sharing new approaches with teachers working in vulnerable situations. And this had a very positive impact on her work.

Léa is an English teacher in a Lebanese private school who was interested by the Bronfenbrenner ecological theory. The theory helped her realize how the relationships between students, parents and their community work and the effect they have on the students’ learning process. This theory allowed her to ‘think outside the box’ and reach out to the parents of a student that was struggling in her class. Her approach helped the student get back on track!

Maryam Kairy from Saudi Arabia, a teacher with 15 years of teaching experience and a teacher trainer, also shared with us an interesting example. She mentioned that this MOOC introduced her to a new digital tool that she is using now with her trainees.

The thing that your lovely course offered me is that I can use the Padlet in teaching and this activity caught my attention, the fact that I can use this tool in teaching or in trainings. And I applied this idea, in a workshop for teachers 2 months ago. We had here a conference for teachers about the requirements of teaching. So, I conducted a workshop about designing teaching for the 21st century and I used the Padlet as an introduction for the teachers and educators, we had 40 participants and it was a beautiful workshop. And on my account on twitter I still have the link of the Padlet that I used and shared with the participants. And I plan on using it again in other trainings soon.

Maryam prepared a PDF version of the training material and uploaded it to Padlet and then shared this link on Twitter. The participants were pleased with this and shared their feedback also on Padlet. She says that this tool didn’t only facilitate her work, but it introduced the participants to a new tool that they can use too.

Over to you

We hope that by taking this MOOC you will learn things that you can use to benefit your own community – to make a difference to your learners, or trainees, or educators you work with. We know that this is likely to happen after you have finished the course, because it takes time to put ideas into practice, and more time to see the results. For this reason, we circulated the Ideas in Practice Padlet with participants in the first run to see if we could collect more stories to share with you.

For now, please share with us in the discussion below the topics or tools that you were able to relate to so far? How are you planning on using this new knowledge and make it your own?

Looking forward to hearing all your creative ideas!