Good afternoon everyone and many thanks for joining us. My name is Efe Celtidou and I'm the Pedagogical Coordinator at School Education Gateway. I would like to welcome you on this webinar on building school-based learning communities for MOOC-based learning. Let me tell you a bit of backstory to this webinar so you get rightly introduced to the topic. As you probably already know, the Teacher Academy of School Education Gateway offers massive open online courses, MOOCs, for teachers for several years now. In 2019, we thought that we could improve in the way we support teachers attending these courses. Although we are aware of the benefits that these courses offer, we are also aware of the struggles some teachers face in this regard in order to benefit from these online professional development opportunities. Low English language skills or low digital competencies, for example, can definitely affect your experience in online courses, making it quite daunting to participate. So we felt like we had to do something about this. We wanted to find a good mechanism to support teachers who don't have this type of confidence or competencies to get on board with our courses. That's why two years ago, we launched a small pilot with eight teachers from different European countries and we worked with them to address this problem. One of the key things that they did during these years was the development of study groups at school that take the MOOCs together with their colleagues. In this way, they managed to provide and find all the necessary support at local level from peers. So with this way, the international European element of the MOOC comes into the local context of the school. Out of this work, a lot of interesting resources and insights have come and that's actually the purpose of today's webinar, to share these experiences with you. Before giving the floor to the speakers, I would like to inform you that this work is continued. We are having now a new group of pilot teachers who have to test the study groups and think of implementation schemes following either a teacher academy or an online course and come back to share the results. So we will keep you posted with our news in this area, so stay tuned. But further ado, I would like to welcome the first two speakers, the teacher Elena Petsi and the teacher Christina Nicoleta, who were both members of the first pilot group and very successfully they managed to create study groups at their schools, inviting colleagues to learn and develop together. So today they will share their experiences with you. After this presentation, Eugenia from the European School Net will tell us more about the impact the local study groups had in the EU Code Week online bootcamp. In the meantime, please feel free to share your comments and questions in the chat and we will make sure to address them by the end of this webinar. Elena, Christina, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you, Efi, and thanks to the School Education Gateway and Teacher Academy for inviting us. I hope you can hear me properly and I will immediately share my screen with you. I hope you can see it. I will put it in presentation mode and I will give the floor to Christina. So I'm Elena. Hello, I'm Christina Nicoleta from Romania. I hope you can hear me well, too. We will start our presentation by trying to know each other better, to see who is with us today. So Elena, if you can share the slide. Yes, of course. Here you are. So you can go to slido.com and enter the code. And the first question is, what country are you from? Please do that. We are very, very interested in seeing who is with us today. So the winner is someone from Croatia, but Lithuania. They put the code inside the answer, please. You answer with your country. So we have all Tunisia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia. Please. Austria. Okay. There you are, a good, well, a good number of European countries and not only European. Croatia, that means there are more than one teacher because the name is in big letters, meaning there are more teachers from Croatia here with us. So please enter slido.com, Romania. Thank you for joining us. Okay. We will wait a little more. And then we will go to the next question, but please. So join at slido.com and enter the code. You can see it in the screen, 853-730. And then you enter the name of your country. Okay, someone from Spain, Turkey. Please. Maybe 20 seconds more before we go to the next question of our slido. Okay. Poland, welcome Poland. Thank you. We will come back to this question later. So we go now to the next question. Have you participated in any MOOCs? You have, yes, many of them, no, but I want to. Yes, some of them and yes, only one. Okay. Yeah, so the majority is someone who is already expert in a way, or at least you already know what a MOOC is. Okay. 17, some of them is the most answered here. Okay. I think we can go to the last question. What was the most challenging thing about the online courses for you, for those who attended MOOCs? So here you can answer about your own experience in participating in online courses or MOOCs. Waiting for your opinion. Okay. The language. Style anywhere, any place you can access, meeting new people, motivating myself, the language, of course. There are answers that somehow are very frequent in everybody's experience about participating in online courses. And we will talk about these during the webinar. Yeah, language, time. English, new experience. Okay. Maybe we will wait a little more, 13 answers till now. Yeah, the answers you gave are mainly the main challenges that everyone, each of us, found when taking a MOOC or when deciding to follow some online course. Yes, time and motivation. Yeah. This is really a big challenge. Yeah. Thank you so much, everybody, for your answer. Thank you, Elena. Okay, so we can come back to our presentation. And Christina, the floor is yours. Okay. I will start by telling you about this great course that was hosted by School Education Gateway. Building school-based learning communities for MOOC-based learning. We had a workshop, a webinar then, too. And this course will be maybe in the future again on the list on School Education Gateway. So be sure not to lose it because it is a great, great course about attending MOOC in your school with your colleagues helping each other to go through it. Yeah, it's a self-paced course. So it's open. You can follow it at your own pace. So yeah, don't miss the opportunity if you're interested in building school-based learning communities, which is something that we are explaining you right now. Okay, the context of our pilot project, I will start by telling you about the connection between School Education Gateway and the tweening that was from the beginning. But as you already know, maybe, the countdown for the European School Education Platform has started. So the both platforms, School Education Gateway and the tweening platform, will merge into the European School Education Platform, retaining your favorite content and its spending on it in a single, modern and accessible space. So you can improve yourself. You can engage in European projects, grow in your profession, get informed about education policies, make your opinion count, and join the biggest teacher community in Europe, which is the tweening. Okay, and the second step of the context is how the School Education Gateway pilot was born. And as Effie told you at the beginning of this webinar and Christina also underlined, we formed a group. We were two teachers who took part in this pilot launched by Teacher Academy in 2019, and we worked on how work or how attend online courses together with our colleagues at school, for instance, or in any case, how to use online courses in a more systematically way to support a teacher's professional development. So these was our group, our former group, and as Effie has underlined, this year 2021 has seen the birth of another pilot group to keep on working and on reflecting on how we can work and how we can learn together with our colleagues. The pilot project was coordinated by two great experts, Nair Carrera. As you can see, she coordinated this pilot, but also the EU Code Week Initiative, which Eugenia will tell you about later. And also Benjamin Hertz, which is Senior Pedagogical Manager of the European School Network Academy. They guided us and helped us to become a very great group of teachers very committed to help our colleagues in attending MOOCs and online courses. At the beginning, there were 10 teachers selected. You can see our very first meeting when we started to know each other and to develop our action plans to involve our colleagues in MOOCs and online courses. Only eight teachers, as Effie said, finished the pilot and were successful in implementing it in their school. Yeah, and we all know that between 2019 and 2021, there's 2020 in between. And this affected a lot also our pilot because as we said before, in 2019 you've seen the picture. We met in present, we met face to face in Brussels in order to start collaborating, to start sharing ideas, and to start implementing the project, the pilot itself. So what happened in 2019? We will explain you in a while in a second, but yes, we have to be aware and to remember what happened in 2020 and also in 2021. So two completely different contexts and way of learning and way of following taking courses. So I will start with the face to face phase in 2019. That was between March and December 2019. I started with a promotion of the pilot in my school. I asked for head teacher support. I gave a press survey to my colleagues. I assisted them with the registering and surfing the school education gateway portal. As you can see in the pictures, we had some peer to peer sessions. And then we started group studies during the module. What was a little bit special in my school was that at the end of the MOOC, we collected our outcomes, our lesson plans in a database that all our colleagues could access and use in their teaching in school. And then we had a post-survey and open door lessons where we implemented what we have learned during MOOCs and invited our colleagues to see that the MOOCs had a very great impact in our teaching. And it was a very big plus for participating in the pilot. What worked well, the other pictures, here you can see we started group work. We have worked in two shifts in the morning and in the afternoon. I have met my colleagues twice a week in the morning and in the afternoon to help them. But I also want to tell you that head teacher support was essential. I used social media to promote the MOOC and somehow the news went outside the school and the teachers from my town and my region started to join the MOOC and to join our study group. We used collaboration and group management tools. We worked together by step module by module and we collaborated with English IT teachers in school. But at some point even students and our own children helped with the biggest problems, the language barrier and the IT skills, low IT skills in some of my colleagues. And the last set of pictures is a session I organized with teacher from outside of my school that wanted to take part in the MOOC and asked for help and what didn't work so well. Of course, as Elena already told you, lack of time management skills, IT and internet surfing skills that needed improvement, language barrier and lack of self-motivation like in your answers in our slides though earlier. Thank you, Elena. Yeah, and as for my experience, well, Christina is a teacher from Romania, I'm a teacher from Italy, but I will tell you that our experiences were largely superposable. We had more or less the same experience. While Christina took another MOOC, I decided to implement with my colleagues at school the Introducing Project Based Learning in your classroom MOOC because this was one of the great needs for my school and my colleagues decided to invest their time in taking this course. So I don't want to repeat what Christina has already underlined. I totally agree with her about what worked well, what didn't work so well. And these were the main challenges I faced and how I tried to solve them. So it's something that you already wrote in the slider for time constraints. There's no good period of time at school. Teachers are always very busy. We took the course in September, October, thinking that it was a good period, but in fact it was not. And the main challenge was that they couldn't do the homework, the home assignment. So this was the first challenge. English is the world and is a real problem for a large part of Italian teachers, the older ones. We don't feel very at ease with English language. Well, of course not for everyone, but for many of my colleagues, yes, it was a problem. Also, ICT was a problem. Bear in mind that this course was taken before the pandemic. So it's true that the pandemic, I suppose, has been a huge problem, but in a way, I can say that as for ICT skills, it has represented a challenge which should be overcome. So I will tell you later about this fact, but before COVID time, ICT was quite a big problem for some of my colleagues. How I tried to solve these challenges? Well, thanks to group work and meeting face to face, teachers could do the activities, could work together during the on-site meetings. This, of course, led to the need for reshaping of the path of the structure of the course itself. I summarized the main concepts. I provided time for the reflection of the topics. Also, I tried to rearrange the development of the activities during the meetings themselves. So it was, well, I tried to rearrange and to reshape the structure of the modules. And meeting face to face, of course, helped teachers, those teachers with less language and or ICT skills. Working together was of great help for all those teachers who didn't feel at ease both with English and or ICT. The opinion of my colleagues, of the teachers who took part in the mock, in the pilot, for them the biggest success for the course was to meet together to follow the course, to work together. I don't know if in other countries, but in Italy we are not, I'm speaking about, I'm talking about above all secondary school teachers, we are not so used to work together. So working together to take this course was really enjoyable and very productive and all the teachers who participated in the course said that this was the added value of the course itself. Well, having a tutor, of course, was very useful and helped a lot and about the content of the mock they took, they appreciated a lot the use of short videos and the inputs they had to further develop these ideas and to reflect, to deepen the ideas provided by those videos. For them, again, what didn't work so well, time constraints both at school and personal level often prevented them to complete the activities. But I have to say that almost all the teachers who took the course, who met together face to face, they did complete the course. So even though the period at school was very busy, they succeeded in completing the course. So now we would like to ask you, you've got the floor, we have explained you our experience, but as you said that you've taken some online courses, please do reflect if you have ever taken a course and online course together with other colleagues. And if not, do you think that it could be interesting to try this way of training to take a course together with some colleagues? And the third question is, what would you like to find in such an experience? Because this pilot is exactly about this idea, to take some kind of professional development but together with some other colleagues, not alone, which is something that you can do whenever you want. You can take a MOOC, but thinking about taking a MOOC, an online course together with some colleagues. So if you want to give your idea, please do tell us your experience. And tell us what would you like to find in such an experience if you would like to try this way of training and so on. So I hope you can write in the padlet. I think I've opened it to everyone. So if you, I see over there that there are some people joining and writing something, okay, yeah. Yeah, to join a study group to follow a MOOC, you can also create or set your own study group at school with your colleagues. You can choose a course, for instance, and try to take it together. Okay, so let's see if someone else is writing down. In any case, we will come back to this padlet at the end of our explanation. And I think that we can go. Yeah, I would like to follow more. Okay, so we'll let you write down. And meanwhile, we can go further. And Christina will tell you the experience in the following two years. Yes. Thank you, Elena. As you already said, it was a totally different phase. After the pandemic started, we moved online. So all the study group couldn't work face-to-face as usual. We started a new study group. I created a Facebook group and more than 100 members joined. They were not only from my school also, but it was a big group from Romania. And at some point, teachers from Republic of Moldova joined us because we shared the same language. So I started to post video tutorials in Romanian language to help colleagues. I organized Zoom meeting after each module opened. I created announcements and polls, news and articles, questions and answers. Because the group was so big and very active. I invited two of my colleagues to be also administrators of the group. So we were three mentors at some point. And we managed to go through the MOOC successfully, this time organizing the group meetings online. Okay. And as for me, it was, again, it was the same idea. So one of the best results and the best product of our pilot, of our first study group, was that we had a lot of ideas and we tried to put in practice those ideas, each of us, in our own situation. And as Christina said, in Italy too, I tried to, well, I went online. We went online and I, well, we did our meetings on Meet, on Google Meet, but the idea is the same. We moved together, we had moved together. And doing it online, having the opportunity to take these MOOCs online, helped a lot of teachers who couldn't join us in presence in the previous section, the previous experiment. Well, we had a lot of teachers who joined us online. And as Christina said, we've got a huge number of participants because they could follow from home and they had the opportunity to join. So the online phase in 2020, from March to October, was to use the digital platform of our regional Office of Education and we organized, I organized some meetings via Meet. And the same as Christina said, I got the help from some teachers, three, four teachers who followed the first section, the first episode, the first chapter of the pilot. And as they already knew what was the structure of the MOOC itself, so they helped me to manage the group. As Christina said, I translated into Italian some parts of the MOOC and we worked on shared presentations, shared padlets, shared learning diaries. I mean, this online phase was characterized by a great willingness of sharing, sharing experiences, sharing tools, sharing documents and so on. And this middle management staff, as Christina said, was very useful to keep all the participants together, to keep things in order. And this was a very, very positive aspect. Well, starting from this January, this year, as I worked per time also at regional office of education, our regional office decided to officially recognize any MOOC of teacher academy, European School Net Academy and also E-Tweening. So when teacher academy, for instance, publishes a course and launches a course, our regional office offers tutorship, I can say so, and at the end of the path, people who successfully attended the MOOC on teacher academy platform, they will receive certification of completion of their activities also by the, by our regional office. So it's, well, what we did was to create a facilitating and company pathway for Italian teachers taking any of these courses. So here you can, you could hear some reflections of the participants, some ideas and so on, but basically the ideas are what we have explained to you now. So from our experience, you can see some advice, some thoughts that will help you in attending courses with your colleagues. Start with a survey on the school staff needs on professional, professional development in order to choose the most suitable MOOC for your colleagues needs. A designated responsible person to monitor the whole team progress because we lack self-motivation sometimes and we need somebody to push a little, to push us a little in, in attending the courses. Together everybody achieves more set up group studies as participants can support and motivate each other. You, you saw that this group studies can be face to face or online. Be very careful with time management, tasks and deadlines, because if the course is live and it has a deadline for your task and you missed it, you won't receive the certificate. So it is important to, to do the time management properly. And the good idea is to create repositories with the materials created during the MOOCs to be used in other educational content in your, in your school to help other teachers to benefit from the MOOC, even though they maybe didn't participate in, in the MOOC. These are our, our advice for you. Yeah, and yeah, what Christina was saying at the beginning, always ask for your head teacher support because you know it's crucial in any school if you don't work with your head teacher support, you know, it won't go very, very far. This is a really, really important aspect. So I was saying before we will focus on the padlet later on. So I hope you have written something. And yeah, Marisa and Maya have often participated in online courses with other colleagues. I really like to try this way. Yeah, yeah, so we, we suggest you to do, to have such an experience because it's really motivating and you, you will get to know even better your colleagues and you can create a more positive learning environment and so on. So, and also Marisa from Piacenza, yes, a MOOC on shared leadership, on teacher academy, opening, twinning. Okay, so, okay, so a lot of ideas. Yeah. Thank you Maya and Mila from Moldova. Moldova is also with us here. I saw on the slide though. Okay. Okay. Yeah, so the idea, so these posts are very positive. The idea is let's try and let's MOOC together. And those were what we, we said at the end of the, of our pilot, trying to, to build something together with our colleagues. So as we said at the beginning of these webinar, these MOOC is an open-ended, I mean it's a self-paced course. So you can take it whenever you want and you can see here the experience we, we had as a pilot group. So if, if you're looking for some ideas, suggestions, advice and so on, don't hesitate and take a look at this, at this course. And yes, of course, let's MOOC together to, to walk better with our colleagues and in our schools. Okay, so I stopped sharing my screen, I hope. Thank you for this very interesting presentation. Thank you for, for sharing the experiences and also some suggestions and advice to the participants who are attending this webinar today. I would also like to highlight the fact that these kind of activities, apart from providing the support for professional development, as you very correctly said, they also provide the opportunity to develop a more collaborative culture at school level. And that's, that's great because this also may lead to other activities that can first of all develop us as professionals and also improve teaching practices and learning practices all, of course, for the benefit of the students. So, yeah, thank you very much. Before leaving, of course, and as promised, I would like also to invite my colleague Eugenia to share more about the impact the local study groups had in the EU Code Week online bootcamp because as part of this MOOC they decided to develop, to invite participants to develop study groups and join this MOOC together. So, Eugenia, the floor is yours. In the meantime, if you have any questions for Christina and Elena, please feel free to post them in the chat and we will make sure to address them. Thank you very much. I feel and thank you as well for the invitation to join this afternoon. It was also very interesting to hear your experiences Christina and Elena leading this study group. So, thank you very much for that. So, as Eugenia mentioned, I wanted to give you a bit of an insight into the impact and results of the study groups that we conducted or that we formed part of the latest EU Code Week MOOC. So, my name is Eugenia and I'm the course coordinator of this MOOC and I just want to give you a bit of an insight into that. So, first of all, I wanted to give you a bit of context of the course. So, as I mentioned, this MOOC was launched within the EU Code Week project and this MOOC was launched from the 27th September or run from the 27th September to the 27th October. So, these are very recent results and very much in tune with what's happening lately in also in the schools. The MOOC counted with three modules, so it's not a very long MOOC and in total we had approximately 1,900 participants. Of these, 175 were part of a study group. So, that's about 9%. I'm sharing these numbers to let you know that these results are with a very small group of people who are part of the study group so that you understand that they don't... not all of the course participants on the MOOC were part of a study group. Just a small percentage as you can see is 9%. And just to get an idea as well, the MOOC participants or a target group of this MOOC were as well school teachers of all levels and all subjects and the topic was coding and computational thinking. Which we launched this MOOC. So, why also Elena and Christina also, that's this topic but I wanted to bring it a bit closer to our project and some of the reasons why we saw the benefits of actually launching study groups because before we had launched, of course, online courses as part of the project but we hadn't done study groups before, so why? First of all, we wanted to localize the impact of the project so within the project we're launching online training courses, as well as school level scheme as well as local communication plans. So this was our chance to bring this online courses and to bring the European dimension as if it was explained at the beginning a bit closer to the local level or to the school level. So this was very important to us. As well we wanted to respond to the feedback that we had receiving previous courses of the project where participants had mentioned that they would like to see more practice, more activities, but as well the possibility to work together on the final course assignments. As well we wanted to leverage a network of active teachers within the project and that many projects also have. Teachers who have expertise on the topic but as well expertise on teacher training and teachers who can also exploit their own network of teachers in their own school or school district or even countries. And as well we had this motivation of increasing the completion rate of our online courses because our completion rate was very much in line with other MOOCs of European School Net Academy and School Education Gateway, but we thought, okay, maybe there's a chance to drive up these numbers a little bit and to see more people going on to obtain these certificates and provide a bit more tailored support. So this is why we decided to go forward with the study groups. And so how we went about it and very quickly from the course coordination what we did is we launched an open call for study group leaders. That means that we recruited people same as in the pilot as Elena and Christina were mentioning and we basically asked them a little bit in this application to tell us what they were planning for as a study group. For example, how many meetings or how frequent they would actually be able to host them. But as well, what was the motivation and their experience and as Elena just mentioned, we also make sure to ask them where they had the agreement of the headmaster and the headteacher because this was a key thing and something incredibly important to launch these courses. So this was very important for us to get to know before we selected our study group leaders. Moving forward with the presentation, by the way, I may refer to study group leaders as SDL. So what I mean by this is the leaders of the study groups such as Elena and Christina themselves. As well, before the course started, we produced some documents to support our study group leaders. For example, we provided a role description and expectations document where we actually gave them some tips and tricks on how to get started and what we expected from them as study group leaders. And as well, we provided a course roadmap. We also had initial study group leaders meetings which, by the way, Christina and Elena very kindly supported us and helped and in this meeting we basically answered the questions of those who had applied to become a study group leaders but as well got them in touch with the technical team of the European School Net Academy where the MOOC was being launched. And as well, we got them in touch with ourselves, with the course coordinators that they could ask questions and manage their expectations and actually decide for themselves whether they wanted to move forward or not. And last one of these, we of course invited them as well to add their own activities. Yeah, sorry, I will speak slower. And as well, we wanted to invite them to create their own activities so that they could actually have a bit of ownership over the course content and this actually turned very nicely because over the course content we were actually able to implement the activities and materials of the study group leaders. In practice, so once we got started and before I wanted to just basically show you a little bit of the documents that we served with them you can see there the role description and expectations where we actually gave them some tips and tricks into how to recruit teachers, how to organize a meeting, how does a meeting look like and as well you can see there a course roadmap that was there only with the study group leaders and that gave them a bit of an idea of the course content so that they could prepare the meetings and could also prepare in advance the course deadlines and also the course milestones. So once the course started and after the course started so how did we kept in touch with our study group leaders because of course we didn't just let them be and do their own thing, we wanted to make sure that we answered their questions. Oh, can you not see me? I don't know if I mentioned you can. Yeah, it's okay, but maybe something on my end. Alright, thank you. So we also wanted to make sure that the study group leaders had support throughout the course and that they didn't feel alone. So for example we had communication with them via email and via the course forum with information, with reminders and as well to make sure that we answered their questions and that they felt supported as well in each module we had a section specific for the study group leaders this means that no other course participants had access to this section and in this section we offer an outline of a meeting as well as tips and tricks and very importantly patlet where they could share their experiences and share with each other their progress, their questions, their challenges and as well motivate each other. As well we poked a focus especially now after the course has finished on promoting their work so this meant that we often invite them to public events to speak out their experience but as well we asked them to share their experience on the project blog and as well we offer a specific certificate for them and as well we carried out a feedback and results survey which results I'm going to be sharing with you just in a minute and as well we're having a final study group leaders meeting where we want to reflect with them on the experience kind of get feedback for future courses and so on and so forth. So basically this comes to say that we just make sure that they feel supported throughout the process and that we are there to ask to answer questions and as well to get feedback from ourselves and improve as we go and improve especially during the course. You can see now on the screen one of the patlets that with the experience of our study group leaders this is an example of a patlet that was actually served with the study group leaders throughout the course. We had one of these weekly so that we could monitor what was going on as well solve questions and that they could actually motivate each other in their progress. And very importantly and something that I wanted to focus on is the impact of the results so as I mentioned the course finished on the 27th of October. So now I can actually give you a bit of insight into what actually happened with these study groups and what actually were the results and also how did the group look like. So in total we had 26 study groups based on 10 different countries. The size of the groups varied quite a lot. We had groups as big as 30 members and groups as small as two members but in average it's about seven members so you can see that in average smaller groups it's about seven to be the norm. Those who were 30 were very much the exception and normally they didn't tend to be more than 10. These groups were integrated mostly by teachers of course as they were at school level basically and the majority of the groups involved primary school teachers so 61% of groups involved primary school teachers then we had as well 34% of the groups that involved secondary school teachers and 19% of the groups actually involved primary school teachers. The numbers do not adapt to 100% that means that the groups were varied so it's not that each group had just one teacher from one school level since the MOOC actually covered all the school levels. As well very interestingly one group actually included Headmasters which I think was a very interesting experience for us to see and to directly involve them not just to have their agreement and support but as well to involve them in the group and also we saw their profiles as members of the groups In practice how did this do play? So we encouraged our study group leaders to hold regular meetings with their group mostly they had one or two weekly meetings each week the course would open one module so we encouraged them to have at least one meeting per week normally the groups met between nine to two times in total that means before the course started until the course ended on average they made about four times in total and so this is a very interesting period and Christina and Elena have mentioned this a little bit because in this autumn of course schools have different policies and approaches towards distance learning and this affected the groups so 70% of the groups chose one way or method of meeting and stuck to that but 30% very interestingly actually varied the way that they met so that means that sometimes they would meet online sometimes they would meet face to face so 61% of the groups actually managed to meet at least once face to face which is actually a very positive result 50% met online at least once and 26% of the groups actually met in a hybrid method which means that some of these meetings were held with some participants on site and some participants connecting remotely what's really positive to see is that actually most groups so 84% had most members attending regularly each and every meeting which actually goes to say that in general a study group members had value in attending these meetings and so it's actually productive so it's actually a very nice number to see there and to see the results of this and you can see actually a screenshot of one of the study group meetings and very interestingly certification so as many of the online courses that we launched of course there was a final course assignment now before this autumn normally for this project MOOCs this final course assignment this final course assignment was done individually so you had to do your activity submitted individually now responding to the feedback and because also we had this study group we allowed them to or we gave the possibility to actually work together on this final course assignment and 16 groups out of 26 16 groups chose this option and the members worked together either with the whole group or in a smaller groups within the study group this is actually really positive because as I was mentioning that means that the positive side and this saw the advantage of working together within these study groups in total 63% of those members of the study groups went on to obtain a certificate this is actually not the highest number but it's actually really positive when you compare it to the average completion rate of other online courses so yes to give you an idea I do not have right now the completion rate since we just finished of this particular course but we run a very similar MOOC just last autumn the deep dive MOOC and 21% of those people who registered to this MOOC went on to obtain the certificate now of course this data is a little bit biased of course because not everyone who registers actually starts the course so to give you a bit of a closer data I can tell you that 43% of those who registered to this online course that was fully online went on to obtain a course certificate whichever data we choose to look at whichever we think is actually closer to the actual course that happened it's still 63% is still way higher still as I mentioned is a very small percentage of the course participants so let's take this with a grain of salt but I think what this tell us is that in general both members and study group leaders did so a positive side of this and in general we did see that more of them actually went on to obtain a course certificate so these are preliminary and very good positive results we also receive very positive feedback from the study group leaders that you can see on the screen in general we see that they value the opportunity of having members with diverse levels of experiences because these allow them to explain the context their content sorry to go through activities and to come with different different levels of expertise so this was really valuable as well they mentioned that the study group members appreciated the possibility of solving challenges and difficulties together before we were talking about how to see the members appreciated but as well another study group leader member mentions that the mix of experiences and approaches towards learning was actually an advantage of this study group so this is a bit in a nutshell the results of our study groups as I mentioned is a small sample but I think it indicates that there is actually some value into blended learning in online courses and we definitely from our project so that there's value as well in bringing the community together to solve challenges and to tackle certain issues together even in an uncertain period like right now even if some of our study groups met fully online still there was a lot of value in getting together working together and solving issues together so this is it from my side but happy to take any questions many thanks so many thanks for sharing this very interesting insight actually it all comes to the fact that the element of being part of a group is a very strong element for keeping us motivated and keep developing ourselves and having the support system we need I think it's very well proved in both activities here there is a question coming from Athanasia from Greece if there is a finding telling which approach proved more successful based on what you described the Eugenia this is a very good question Athanasia so I cannot give you the numbers right now what we can do and if you're interested and since we're in touch I can let you know then later on I can look at whether online versus face-to-face actually proved more successful in terms of certification in general we do not see this I think in general what brings this access to a study group is the possibility of gathering together and meeting and at first I have to say that when we started organizing these groups we were a bit skeptical of the possibility of meeting online because from the pilot we had hair of meeting face-to-face but not online but in general we saw that the success rate of those meeting online and those meeting face-to-face actually had very similar completion rates I cannot tell you now with numbers because we haven't looked into that but this is a very nice very interesting question I will definitely look into also participants in the chat mentioned that the the main barrier was finding meeting hours I don't know if you have any suggestion for that Stina, Elena or even Eugenia if you have a suggestion about this something that works well about how to find meeting hours to meet with your study group I think you said also about how you can keep the commitment participants in the chat accept that this is indeed a very difficult and challenging part in my case I used collaborative tools like Doodle where all my colleagues expressed their their choice and in the end we choose the best option for everybody yeah the same for us and you know if you work with your colleagues at school it's in a way it's easier to find a common slot where to meet whereas while you're working with teachers from my case from all over the region it's a little bit more complicated but as Christina said I said to Doodle and the majority decided normally we we met late afternoon so that every teacher could end his or her school day we met towards 5-6 o'clock in the afternoon but it's not a rule I mean we just came to this agreement and it worked for us so you have to to study beforehand you have to study the composition of your group and try to adapt indeed you have to spend some time to first of all to set a plan on how to work in this study group and the self-paced MOOC that we talked about provides useful guidance on how to plan this process how to support your colleagues if you want to be the leader of this process and how to consider all the practicalities for instance how to find the right timings for instance for meeting I shared also in the chat the tool Christina mentioned the Doodle which is a very handy tool that can help you find the right time slot for you to have a meeting I have another question from Vasily Ki who asks how many times during the week I suppose he's referring to the meetings how many times should we meet per week in the online course what's your suggestion here yes Elena I will say once a week not more because teachers can't afford too busy they already feel themselves very very busy and overwhelmed by work so in my experience I couldn't ask for more than once a week which was as Christina said and also Eugenia while you are following the a MOOC which is live not an already ended MOOC it's very useful because you concentrate on that meeting all the issues questions, doubts ideas suggestions of that module of that week so I think that once a week is a good compromise in my case there were two meetings but not with the same colleagues I was in both meetings but my colleagues were those who could come in the morning and the others who could come in the afternoon so for the teachers there was only one meeting per week as Elena said I see also a comment in the chat from a participant who says that it's about also creating this climate of mutual trust and also to have it as a fun moment to meet together and learn together not like an extra work that we have to do but to really enjoy this process and to have the opportunity to empower this collaborative culture that we mentioned also before Yes indeed we ended we always end the MOOC with a small party when it was possible when we met face to face so the last meeting is always working meeting but also having fun having some sweet or some drink together and online we tried to replicate in a way that of course it's not the same Great so let's come closer with our colleagues in our school and let's learn together and develop our competencies and our knowledge together so yeah we highly recommend you everybody to follow this MOOC if you want to learn more about this process and if you need any kind of support we are here of course to support you feel free to check out the teacher academy online courses so they are doing online courses or the courses in European school and find the one that fits your needs at this period find your colleagues and join them together


Extracellular vesicles, EVs, have become increasingly important in clinical laboratory medicine due to their potential use in disease diagnosis and prognosis. However, the purity of these vesicles has been a source of debate as there are currently no specific markers to identify them. This has led to difficulties in obtaining high-purity EVs, which can be problematic when conducting biomarker-based clinical tests. To address this issue, we propose an alternative approach to focus on the significance of EVs rather than their purity. By doing so, it is possible to achieve adequate levels of EV enrichment without compromising on the quality of the samples. This review discusses the current definition of EVs, markers, and contaminants, isolation methods, and the conclusions drawn from clinical studies using less pure but easier to operate EV isolation methods. This article was authored by Li Mingzhang, Wensui Ma, Sinegon, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.