Sharklab Strategic Partnership – digital education response to Covid Erasmus Project

Project Title

Sharklab Strategic Partnership – digital education response to Covid

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Environment and climate change; Open and distance learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the services that many environmental NGOs are able to provide in Malta and overseas, particularly in the area of education. The majority of this educational training was previously done face to face and this direct style of contact has not been possible since COVID health and safety issues emerged late in Quarter 1.

There is however still a need for the complementary school education that NGOs provide, as the marine world is seen as being one of the habitats studied under the school science curriculum.

A Strategic Partnership is proposed between Sharklab in Malta, LAMNA in Spain and Marine Dimensions in Ireland.

We aim to compensate for the hands on educational training gap that the covid restrictions have created by producing new engaging digital material. We propose that this open source material can be used in local participating schools in Malta, Spain and Ireland. Our aim is to continue to support learning about the natural world, encouraging students into STEM related subjects generally – doing this virtually rather than face to face.

We will build and share one video, one interactive presentation and one quiz/activity each quarter – so across the two years we will create and share 8 videos, 8 interactive presentations and 8 quizzes/activities. These will be available in English, Maltese, Spanish and Catalan.

We propose to hold quarterly multiplier events in each of the three countries with 10 participant teachers attending each – giving us a minimum reach of 30 school teachers every quarter. Holding these quarterly multiplier events across two years, we will support 240 participants overall, but we have costed for only 30 as we wish to keep costs down to ensure the project remains cost efficient, and the cost benefit stacks up. All of these participants will be trained virtually and can take advantage of this new digital material

Through recording these multiplier events we will be able to share the training session and the material more widely than the participating schools – we propose that this material could and should be open to any school using these languages.

In light of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and due to varying national restrictions between countries, all transnational project meetings, multiplier events, and short-term joint staff training events, being proposed in this project, will be undertaken virtually. Therefore, no travel expenses are being claimed in this project.

We intend that students and teachers in participating schools will receive 24 new pieces of new inspiring digital material to help students learn and to encourage them to consider STEM related education and roles as they move through life. They will get these each quarter, providing them with one new digital training item they can use in their school every month.

In terms of expected impact on participating organisations, we will all learn new digital skills by sharing techniques and helping and encouraging each other. We will source external digital help and training when needed. We will all become more digitally capable and able to continue to offer new material within our own organisations going forward, and hopefully we will continue to collaborate and work together, as we do today.

Through addressing the problems and restrictions that covid has created, we believe we can fill the educational gap and move our offering from local to national and ultimately to international.

Ultimately, through our wider international contacts we hope to inspire other environmental NGOs to consider offering something similar.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 51119 Eur

Project Coordinator

Sharklab & Country: MT

Project Partners

• Marine Dimensions
• Associació LAMNA per a l’estudi dels elasmobranquis a la Comunitat Valenciana