Enhancing education in the digital age in Moldova: insights from Filippo Del Ninno
During the pandemic lockdowns, necessity forced education systems around the world to adapt quickly. Like many of their counterparts, Moldova’s schools swiftly switched to online learning.
Filippo Del Ninno, the European Training Foundation’s (ETF) country liaison for Moldova, applauds the nation's response, highlighting the valuable role played by the private sector, non-profit organisations and international organisations.
Embracing digital education and lifelong learning, Moldova is also addressing the need to constantly improve the labour market outcomes of its population. There may still be obstacles ahead, but the steadfast efforts to enact systemic change, supported by strategic partnerships and organisations like the ETF, have set Moldova on a promising trajectory towards becoming a digitally progressive participant in European education and training.
“They invented a system from scratch and were quite creative and flexible in the solutions they found,” says Filippo Del Ninno, a human capital development expert and the European Training Foundation’s (ETF) country liaison for Moldova.
The government supported parents, teachers, students, and schools by drawing up guidelines for a healthy lifestyle during quarantine and launched a programme to support mental health. The public and private sectors joined forces on a campaign to provide teachers with free internet access for two months. To facilitate distance learning and teaching, as well as education process management, Simpals (a private company) in collaboration with the UN and the Association of ITC Companies made the platform, Studii, widely available. By July 2020, over 70 public schools and 77,000 users had benefitted.
"This was a remarkable feat since digital learning in Moldova was limited before COVID. Now that schools have gone back to in-person learning, countries are faced with two choices: resume traditional teaching and learning models or continue pushing for the widespread adoption of digital pedagogies. Moldova has chosen the latter," says Del Ninno
Taking the decision to embrace change has come at the right time for Moldova as the Eastern European country was granted EU candidate country status in June 2022. Being on the path to EU membership unlocks resources that will give Moldova the opportunity to develop all sectors, which, of course, includes the digitalisation of education systems. The challenge for Moldova lies in its preparedness to take advantage of these resources by building capacity to handle the extra workload generated. Shoring up government staff responsible for managing the newly available funding will be crucial to maximising their impact.
The ETF’s role is to support developing countries bordering the EU, like Moldova, to improve their vocational education and training systems (VET), analyse skills needs, and develop their labour markets. As such, the ETF will continue to work with Moldova to plan its digital future by undertaking progress monitoring and expertise provision to help shape the country’s VET policy.
"Moldova offers many valid learning points on ways to optimise the digital transition in education that can be of value to other countries," adds Del Ninno.
These include: integrating sub-sectoral reform to achieve faster and better results in terms of digital teaching and learning; monitoring the rate at which teachers embrace new technologies and set time-bound targets for this to happen; moving beyond the textbook and developing digital teaching material that is student-centred; creating awareness at all levels that the role teachers and students play is changing; mindfully managing staff resources; and being attentive to the expense and challenge of digitalisation being over used as an excuse to stall reform.
Examples from Moldova on how the education system is moving forward on digitalisation
SELFIE: a Moldovan success story
SELFIE (Self-reflection on Effective Learning by Fostering the use of Innovative Educational technologies) is one of the tools Moldova used to assess the readiness of its schools to integrate digital training and pedagogy. Moldova partnered with the ETF and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) to deploy SELFIE within the context of “Digital Moldova 2020", a project that kicked-off on 18 February 2020. The tool was piloted in a number of vocational schools before it was applied more broadly to include all vocational schools and in 2022, to all general education schools as well. Today, “every single school in Moldova has gone through the exercise,” Del Ninno observes. As a result, Moldova’s education ministry can now see where each school stands in terms of digitalisation.
This knowledge is not based on informal conversations with school leaders, it is based on self-assessment exercises carried out by teachers, students, and administrators. With this new-found perspective, policy makers understand the extent to which schools are capable of integrating digital training. They can then provide resources specific to each schools’ needs. The impetus behind SELFIE is, thus, non-judgemental. Its purpose is to conduct a thorough 360° review in order to implement the right policies.
This approach saves time and generates efficiencies, but “it is not about a ministry imposing its will, it’s about creating awareness and a digital mentality,” Del Ninno says.
Follow-up work on SELFIE involves establishing digital action plans based on feedback from staff and students regarding their relationship to new technologies, and setting-up a way to monitor indicators identified by the action plan.
To make sure these objectives are reached, the Ministry of Education and Research is working in partnership with the ETF and Future Classroom to develop a methodology to incorporate digital action plans in the school development plans, as well as build a corresponding monitoring policy within the ministry. Carrying out these steps will enable Moldova to partner with Future Classroom Lab to ensure that schools maintain a results-oriented outlook and that policies align with actual needs.
Towards system-wide education reform with MIIDIV
The ETF has joined forces with the Austrian Development Association (ADA) and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC) on the Moldova Integrated Initiative for Digitalisation in VET or MIIDIV. This initiative has two approaches: the first one is a bottom-up, peer-to-peer approach that allows schools with examples of best practice in place to share their experiences with other schools. The idea is to push these examples in digitalisation up to system-level; and the second is a top-down approach that entails learning from pilot projects to determine what worked well and from that basis define a national policy.
Managing digital education content is also an important component of this initiative. In the short-term, digital content used during the pandemic needs to be mapped and clustered so that it remains accessible. In the medium-term, more advanced and interactive solutions could be developed. One solution could be to expand use of successful Moodle platforms such as the one developed by the Centre of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) for Information and Communication Technologies (ITC).
The MIIDIV project will also support the establishment of a quality assurance process for digital teaching and learning materials. The ETF will facilitate dialogue on defining digital content and establishing quality assessment (QA) for it. During the pandemic there, QA was limited, because the content had to be created and used immediately. Going forward, it is imperative to establish clear criteria to evaluate this content in terms of the competences it develops for students and the competences required by teachers to effectively impart skills and knowledge digitally.