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Grantee loginBetween 2019-2022 Predau Viitor matured as an educational program, consequently, by 2025, Tech Soup aims to reach and support at least 60% of Romanian CS teachers in their effort of using effective and inclusive teaching practices.
CONTEXT
Despite of the emerging pervasiveness of technology in our daily lives, the digital skills in Romania are worryingly low. According to Eurostat, in 2021 only 28% of the general population (16 to 74 years old) has basic digital skills, far from the best performing countries such as Netherland and Finland (both at 79%) and from the European target of 80% of EU citizens with basic digital skills by 2030. In the age segment of 16 to 24 years, the situation is relatively better with 47% of Romanians having basic digital skills, but still, it is the lowest performance in EU where the average is 71%. These data point to the acute need for improvement of CS/ICT classes as public education should be responsible for building at least the basic digital skills for a large majority of students.
By 2025 Asociația Techsoup aims to become the leading provider in the professional development of Romanian CS/ICT teachers, with a functional growth model and funding to sustain scale. As a result, 4,200 CS/ICT teachers should graduate at least one professional development experience (PDE) and at least 40% of them should prove able to adopt effective and inclusive teaching practices.
The key activities of the program are:
- Consolidation of Techsoup capacity to conduct regular needs assessment of teachers. In order to design relevant courses, Techsoup will gain a good understanding of the field with a cost-effective methodology for data collection and analysis.
- Development of a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platform that will allow higher numbers of concomitent trainings with many automated facilities, allowing Techsoup to reach large number of teachers without a significant increase in human resources.
- Marketing and communication to ensure a good positioning of Techsoup in the community of teachers and a good outreach for course enrollment.
- Design and delivery of twelve free of charge professional development experiences (PDE – trainings of various intensities) for CS/ICT teachers with four new products each year, half of them of higher intensity (courses or micro-courses). Each PDE will be available for several rounds, while some asyncronous PDEs will be permanently on offer.
- Ensuring the financial sustainability of the program.