We asked our members what they were doing since mid-March to create and facilitate online learning, training and support opportunities for youth leaders, youth workers and youth work organisations. Here we share our experiences with reflections, challenges, success and questions. This the 1st part of blog posts where we collect training practices in response to COVID-19 impact on international youth work mobility.

Jan Lai

Activity: Keep it changing
Dates: 14-23 April
Participants: Italian youth workers

Your personal/professional reflection on challenges, successes and questions of doing this online: the training was commissioned by an Italian NGO to train its youth workers to deliver content online to their young beneficiaries. Successful online webinar, partially successful continued support that should have lasted longer in order to answer fully to the needs of participants.

Participants feedback, if available: on a scale up to 5, 46% gave a 4 and 46% a 5 about the way training course satisfied their expectations. Exactly the same percentages for the answer to a question about their active participation: 69% gave a 5 to the question if they’d want to do it again.

Federica Demicheli

Activity: Capacity building online for hosting and sending organisation in SOUTH MED
Dates: 28/29 March
Participants: Responsibles for hosting and sending projects within the European Solidarity Corps in South Med countries

Personal/professional reflection on challenges, successes and questions of doing this training online:
The training was commissioned by SALTO YOUTH EuroMed as part of their tasks in developing and managing the ESC activities in South Med countries. I was surprised by the number of NGOs that applied and fully participated in the whole training and was very interesting how they got engaged in the interactive activities using questionnaires, poll and divide them into small reflection groups. The challenge was to support who, among the pax, was not fluent in English. The translation “in plenary” was a challenge and even in subgroups speaking different “darija” it was not easy to include them.

Participants feedback, if available: Participants rated the training being good and they asked for individual coaching about Youthpass and other technical topics.

Sandra van de Kraak

Activity: youth ambassadors’ online meeting from Cities of Learning
Dates: 1, 8, 15 May 2020
Reference link: Tilburg City of Learning
Participants: young leaders with interest to meet other young leaders from other Cities of Learning (participating are young leaders from Saxony Anhalt, Vilnius and Tilburg)

Your personal/professional reflection on challenges, successes and questions of doing this online: For me personally it looks like it goes quite natural for everybody. People from different cities didn’t know each other before the start of these online meetings. We are using Zoom, different people in the group can take the lead, getting to know went quite quick, participants are sharing, planning and doing. People are still finding their roles.

MarCus Vrecer

Activity: Europe talks Solidarity – 4thought for Solidarity
Date: April 21st, 3pm – 4.30pm
Participants: 300+ viewers, 1 moderator, 4 speakers, 3 back office/technical staff
More: Facebook event, recording/video

Your personal/professional reflection on challenges, successes and questions of doing this online:

• Facebook live stream from Zoom is a good format to reach many people and produce a recording for promotion
• a backstage team for technical issues as well as for taking care of comments and posts on the Facebook wall (eg sorting questions for Q&A, engaging participants via comments) is very important
• testing everything beforehand (technical set-up, task division, presentations etc) is very important
• it makes sense to start the live stream already some minutes earlier with music and a cover slide with basic instructions
• it was appreciated that during the 90 minutes we had different types of blocks, eg intro/updates/outlook by Resource Centre, videos, presentation by experts with screen-sharing, a panel discussion with Q&A, and behind the scenes insights
• while the Facebook wall is easily accessible, the disadvantage is that all type of comments mix with the actual Q&As. To make a dedicated space for Q&A however, reduces the immediate accessibility
• there are not many possibilities to influence what zoom actually live streams
• it is appreciated if outcomes are made available afterwards, and all pending questions/issues are taken care of, as well as the graphic recording is provided

Panagiotis Mamouzakis

Activity: The Couch Filmmaker
Dates: March – May 2020
Reference link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheCouchFilmmaker/
Profile of participants: 100 ex-participants of Erasmus+ KA1 Youth Worker Mobilities, focused on digital and specifically video skills who I trained offline before

Your personal/professional reflection on challenges, successes and questions of doing this online:

• Online is more difficult but possible
• I prefer offline
• Knowing the participants beforehand helped to establish a very fast connection and commitment
• Having participants with similar interests (video making) helped the consistency of the activity.
• The drop out rate is tremendous between weeks and in general in online learning.

Participants feedback, if available: Τhey described it as a great quarantine activity and a good way to reconnect with fellow ex-participants.