Digital Nation to train 15 percent of Romanian professors how to teach online

Digital Nation announces the start of its national ‘Professor in Online’ training course for May 2020. The program, which aims to prepare educational personnel in delivering online classes over the next semester, and features digital skill-building as a key pillar of national continuity in Romania, found significant demand from professors, with over 35.000 registrations since launch.

With schools closed and the pandemic fallout continuing to sustain a state of limited access to educational services in Romania, Digital Nation launched ‘Professor in Online’, a national training program which enables professors to lead the online educational journey. Over 35.000 professors, or about 15 percent of the K-12 educational staff in Romania, have already enrolled in the accelerated program, in a registration time frame that barely spanned 10 days. This makes it the most extensive training effort conducted so far in Romania.

The “Professor in Online” program, which registered 8500 participants already, is carried out under the National Continuity Initiative, a platform led by Digital Nation to help key sectors of Romania adapt to the digital transformation that is currently underway. The educational track enjoys support from companies like Google, UiPath Foundation, and OMV Petrom, and aims to bridge a private-public partnership in Romania, focused on boosting digital competences and mitigating the risks of digital exclusion in the context of rapid digitization.

With education as a key pillar of the National Continuity Initiative, the “Professor in Online’ track supports teachers, professors and other educational staff in the development of EU-certified digital skills and competences, through an intensive 7-day course, offered free of charge.

Guided by mentors and assisted by a dedicated support team, teachers navigate the main challenges in online teaching and quickly learn how to organize and manage a tele-conference, digitize their teaching materials, generate homework, issue tests and grade students in a virtual catalog, while getting acquainted to online etiquette and experiencing a digital classroom as students.

”Romanians today are very focused on overcoming obstacles during the pandemic crisis, and they are ready to do that by being responsible and embracing change, as recent studies show. We’ve all seen how digital skills now prove essential and critically important not only for job security in today’s labor market, but also as a prerequisite into classic jobs like teaching. At Digital Nation, we have been investing in digital skill-building for years and we are now happy to put our experience to good use. We salute professors for their massive mobilization and passion for continuous education, and we hope more partners will support us, so we can train even more professors by the start of the next school yea,” said Paul Apostol, Digital Nation founder.

The “Professor in Online’ track aims to support Romanian authorities with a nationally sourced, pre-tested, benchmarked and ready-to-implement methodology of accelerated digital skills building. This mission is that much more relevant considering the pandemic context and historical data which shows that Romanians’ digital skills are the lowest among EU member states, according to DESI Report 2019.

Additionally, the program targets the Romanian’s workforce digital competitiveness, as the yearly EU Report on digital economy finds Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Poland have the lowest scores in the EU, with Romania last on DESI’s Human Capital dimension. Meanwhile, other countries have already advanced national programs that support digital education and digital skill building, like Spain’s DigComp for teachers and others currently under EU implementation.

Digital Nation is a private Romanian organization that develops accelerated digital skill training programs for the modern workforce. Digital Nation combines its own learning architecture with RDEM (Remote Digital Education Model) and DigComp (the EU Digital Skill Framework) methodologies to prepare the new generation of digitally qualified specialists.