Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) included the Tava Klase (Your Class) educational TV channel developed by the Ministry of Education and Science (MoES) of Latvia among the best educational solutions implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic. You can find a list of OECD solutions here: oecdedutoday.com

To help the countries of the world overcome the challenges of the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 disease in the area of education, the OECD, in co-operation with the Harvard Global Education Innovation Initiative and the World Bank, has created a data base of the best education initiatives of the world. The data base lists innovative educational solutions during the pandemic, which includes the Your Class channel developed by the MoES. The Minister for Education and Science, Ilga Šuplinska, expressed satisfaction due to the fact that the Your Class initiative not only received high ratings in Latvia and 70 other countries, but was noticed by international experts as well. She explained that Your Class was a competence approach-based pilot project, which was driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. “This type of learning platform resolves numerous problems that the sector of education has been facing for a considerable period of time – it promotes a change of thinking and methodology, develops self-guided learning and problem solving skills of pupils, as well as increases the professional prestige of a teacher and resolves the problem of the shortage of educators,” the minister says. MoES indicated that the highest appraised projects included, for instance, a Dutch self-study project for students, a Spanish on-line portal for pupils, students and their families, the remote learning project of the Finnish public medium Yle, and many others.

OECD experts have indicated that the Covid-19 pandemic was a serious test for education systems worldwide; therefore, the implementers of education policy must take care to ensure that the quality of education does not suffer, even if millions of children and students are isolated in their homes and cannot attend schools, the MoES said. Different countries used various approaches to ensure the accessibility of education during the Covid-19 pandemic and the MoES emphasises that the project of the OECD was developed to enable countries to learn from the best examples.

The project was implemented by the MoES, in co-operation with the Vecāki par labāku izglītību (Parents for Better Education) initiative group, thus ensuring the development of original learning content and broadcasting thereof on the free television platforms ReTV and Sportacentrs.com TV. The technological partners of the project are Telia Latvija and Veset, which provided television channel research services, as well as on-line broadcasting, on the platform tavaklase.lv. More than 100 teachers throughout Latvia were involved in the development of the content, and several public personalities, singers and artists provided support to the teachers within this project.