The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF virtual intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> We all live in a digital world. We all need it to be open and safe. We all want to trust.
>> And to be trusted.
>> We all despise control.
>> And desire freedom.
>> We are all united.
>> JOYCE CHEN: All right. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining our IGF 2021 session on Learning Resilience in the Face of the Pandemic. Today's session is an interesting one, and I thank you for joining us. I know we are competing with quite a number of sessions, including a main session. For you to be here we really, really appreciate it.
We will look at the impact of the COVID‑19 pandemic on capacity building and learning. Needless to say, the pandemic has affected all of our lives, including those of us who are in the technical community, who are working to provide network access, working to provide training, and capacity building opportunities for people who are in rural or underserved communities.
Now if you notice in the session title, there is a nice play of words, because today we are going to talk about learning resilience. And that is in the sense of learning how to be resilient during the pandemic and meeting challenges. And also in the sense of resilience in education and learning, despite the pandemic. In this session we will explore a range of different case studies, such as Japan's K12 education, technical assistance in the Asia‑Pacific Region, and fostering diversity and gender empowerment in Southeast Asia.
Our first speaker, I would love to introduce to you is Dr. Masaki Umejima, from Keio University. I would like Dr. Masaki Umejima to introduce yourself and tell us about distance learning over an open network policy for K12 education in Japan. Please.
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: Yep. Thank you for inviting me and to this precious opportunity. I'm Masaki Umejima, associate professor in Keio University and ICT promotion. I think an advisor in Ministry of Education in Japanese Government.
Today my presentation title is distance learning for K12 education in Japan, the Nagasaki‑Takaoka. Nagasaki is a name of a city and Takaoka is a name of a city. Please remember the two city names.
So what is the Nagasaki model? Every classroom can connect with all nationwide and worldwide classrooms, having the Internet access. And cybersecurity is a very important issue. So apply data security based on end‑to‑end encryption.
So every school is connected to the Internet. Speed is very high. Plus and school can get free access to cloud service, like Zoom and so on.
So the system is very simple. So satisfaction from students and teachers to the Nagasaki and Takaoka model. It targeted the quality of distance learning lessons at about 60% of that of face‑to‑face lessons. This is a very important policy. The distance learning cannot overwhelm the quality of the face‑to‑face class. So the Nagasaki‑Takaoka has targeted 60% of face‑to‑face lessons. This is the research.
So anyway, students showed very good satisfaction, almost 90% plus students were satisfied with distance learning. How about teachers? Teachers showed 72% showed good satisfaction to distance learning.
So learning, four factors drive innovation in school education. First, high speed Internet. Second one tablet in the classroom. Third, teachers delivering distance education. And fourth, the education content enabling free access for students.
So these four factors can drive innovation in daily school education. So why I say the speed of the Internet is very important? Because originally the Nagasaki‑Takaoka model is school on the Internet Asia project. So Asia project has provided the ideal environment. The Universities in Asia have managed and utilized the high speed internet for research purposes since 1996. SOI Asia has almost 20 years' history of learning the Internet operation.
So high speed Internet provided a lot of opportunities in terms of research and in terms of education. So let me share one photo in Japanese public school. Now every student has a tablet for taking notes. A student can share the note with the teacher. This is very interesting. After singing a song a student put the data on a note and share it with the teacher.
Not only with one teacher, a student can share digital note with many teachers surrounding a school, not only in a school and then student exchange note with a teacher in overseas. This is a very interesting model.
So the pandemic happened. So we provided two things to student. First, we gave one tablet to student. After that, we provided the high speed Internet access for a student in home. So every student joined a lecture remotely by a tablet. And that tablet has Internet access in the home.
So I add two pillars on existing four factors; affordable Internet access service in the home, and one tablet for every student. So these three factors enabled education continuity in the emergency situation, in the critical situation such as COVID‑19.
So the University and the Government must collaborate to each, to implement education continuity. So that's learning I think from Japan's case. User information please access I think the book. So I think, this book provides free access. So thank you for I think giving me the precious opportunity to present Japan's case. Thank you.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thank you very much. Very interesting case. When I came across it, I thought it was such an interesting case study that should be showcased at the IGF. Just having the idea of, you know, providing network access, particularly to areas where rural areas and places where there is not easy access and providing students especially an opportunity to learn. And the interesting thing is that this has happened even before the pandemic ‑‑ this project has gone on for many years. And now during the pandemic we see that it is such a valuable thing. So thank you very much for sharing.
And we will get back to you with Q and A in a little while. But before that, let me get to my next speaker. So I would like to invite Tashi Phuntsho from APNIC to share his experiences providing training and technical assistance to the community in the Asia‑Pacific Region. Tell us about yourself.
>> TASHI PHUNTSHO: Can you see my slides and hear me okay?
>> JOYCE CHEN: Yes.
>> TASHI PHUNTSHO: Good evening. Good morning, good afternoon, evening, whichever time zone you are in. I'm Tashi Phuntsho. I'm one of the trainers here, network analysts and currently managing the training delivery and technical assistance team. My e‑mail address is there.
Anyways, this is for us to share our lessons learned in the period of COVID for the last two years. Just a snapshot of what APNIC training consists of. APNIC does a bit more than training. The obvious one is instructor led training. We have webinars that cater to interesting stuff of that people do. It could be anything interesting. People might be breaking things in their network, if they like to share their experience that comes as a webinar. We also have APNIC academy which has evolved from our initial idea of being a place where we could push our prerequisites as online courses and virtual labs. And during the COVID period our academy has evolved to be more than that. We have self‑based learning. And we provide technical assistance to the community, especially our member based people who need help with any technology deployment. Not everything. We don't want to overstep in to the consultant's areas.
And I added a fifth circle, the community build. APNIC also focuses a lot on human networking. And our team has been evangelizing human networking for a while. We focus on network operators' group in our parts of the world, JNGO. PPNGO is very popular. SGNGO is very popular. In the interest of time, during the COVID period what was the problem with APNIC training in specific to instructor led training? The problem with our training unlike other trainings we focus on real world operations focused training. So it is very much more focused on us sharing experiences. So we hardly teach. We discuss a lot. Ex‑engineer I share my experience.
So when your scope of training is that it becomes really challenging with the online delivery. If it was a structured delivery it might work for us. We have had challenges.
Hence why we used to deliver this predominately in a face‑to‑face setup. And it is targeted, targeted meaning either we do a needs assessment and try to deliver. Or it could be a network operator's group or an NGO or a University or a conference that's happening in economy that wants us to deliver a certain topic. Hence why it is very targeted. It is generally done face to face.
During COVID, after APNIC records, in February 2020, so we took about two months just to understand how to move our things to online setup. So it was only in April that we were really ready to actually give it a go. We had lots of issues adapting our content and session plans. Just the way we would normally teach. We are all engineers. Moving from a face‑to‑face setup to online was challenging. What we noticed there was this dead silence in the online setup. You are teaching a group of engineers who really doesn't seem they want to be there for that session.
So that silence not knowing how to read people's expressions, it was a major problem. While we had 2, 300 people registering for an event we would end up with two or three people showing up on the day of the session. That was a major problem.
Positives, yes, we could reach more people for sure. We could also do more just because we didn't have to travel. Delivering from here. But we were also very conscious what impact were we having. What are the take‑aways from an online session compared to a face‑to‑face session?
Some of the quick or low hanging fruits that we tried to tackle first, let's focus on delivery tools and techniques. We have a nice media room in APNIC. Test screens all over multiple cameras so that we can use digital wide. Again like I said our crowd is predominately 90% of our participants engineers. Of me sitting there and reading a slide never seems to work. Whiteboarding, explaining how I broke things, for example, so they understand not to do it or make the same mistakes I made.
We also realized in our parts of the world that's why I like to see in the Japan Internet is not an issue during Masaki's talk. In our part of the world, not economy is equal. There are many economies that where participants can barely afford good Internet connectivity. We found out that we will request participants to turn off their videos. Nobody wants to look stupid in front of their peers. People will hold back questions which they were asked in a face‑to‑face teaching during coffee breaks or during break times they can access without others knowing. So we came up with this concept of all right, we will let you ask anonymous questions. Here is an open document, type whatever you want. Don't have to raise your hand or verbalize your questions. One of us will answer.
We threw in quizzes. We went with a problem‑based learning approach where we captured the flag kind of problem‑based learning in our teachings.
For lab, because our teachings are very lab heavy APNIC training. So we needed a different approach because Zoom chat like Joyce said earlier it is very difficult to monitor the Zoom chat when people are trying to interact with each other and it just goes away. It scrolls away. And if someone was tagging you you missed that. So we started using Discord for our lab interactions. And we need at least two trainers to teach. One to teach and one to monitor the questions and answer the questions. We soon realized that we can't adapt or adopt our face‑to‑face teachings in to online setups. We went to shorter tutorials and we have to cater to a massive time zone in the Asia‑Pacific Region. Everyone got a chance to sit through those. And delivery mode, this is where I would like to spend a bit of time. We soon realized that we are hosting open tutorials. And we had good attendance, good interactions because they had a say in what content they want. Instead of trying to guess what content might be suitable for people.
We had this trial. We were trying to deliver to people's text for a while. Interactions were bad. So we again trialed some hybrid approach where participants would be sitting in a common room, COVID restrictions permitting and we would deliver them remotely. That worked really well, too. And you can see that in this year's numbers. We delivered 94 trainings across the Asia‑Pacific Region. And you can see the majority of them were targeted hybrid trainings. And we had only about 40% of those were open tutorials. Attendance in targeted or hybrid events were much higher.
Now did COVID fake our core service which is technical assistance? Massive. It is done better when you are in person, observing someone's network. But we received about 18 requests this year. We were able to only cater to about 30% of them. We acted on all the requests that came in but from a success point of view, success meaning yes, we held to the deployment. How much of an impact did it have in that economy? We managed only about 30% of 18 requests that came in, which is a shame honestly.
Finally, the most important part for me being an engineer and having learned everything I learned through human networking, without having a formal certification or anything learning from peers like Philippe Smith and others, mentors, we believe heavily in human networking. Just to give a comparison, in 2018 and '19 we managed to start ‑‑ help Papua New Guinea. In the last two years we couldn't get any NGO off the ground. How do you preach human networking, convince competitors to work with each others when you are not there as a middle neutral person to facilitate that? So that has really been a massive struggle for us.
Thank you, Joyce. Sorry if I overran.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks very much. Don't worry. We are good on time. Really sorry to hear it has been a challenging year, especially needing to transition from what used to be face‑to‑face training and then having to do a lot of, a lot of online, you know, remote learning and having to try and change and adjust the way training is done, particularly when you have so many components of the training that are hands‑on. You need the network engineers to get in to the system and follow you step by step. It hasn't been easy. We will hear more about that as well I think during the Q and A.
So next our final speaker is Maria Theresa Perez. She coordinates the project in the Philippines. Please introduce yourself and share about this interesting project with us.
>> MARIA THERESA PEREZ: Thank you. Am I audible?
>> JOYCE CHEN: Yes. Just give me a second to bring up your slides, if you don't mind.
>> MARIA THERESA PEREZ: Sure. So I will be introducing myself. I'm Maria Theresa Perez from the Switch Sea project and one of the national coordinators. So today I'll be discussing what Switch Sea is, the goals of the project, our activities, and then some lessons learned.
Next slide. So Switch Sea is supporting women, IT research leaders in Southeast Asia. We started May of 2020. We started at the height of the pandemic. And we will end in April of 2022 next year. This is a project of the APNIC Foundation, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs. We are a multi‑economy project. We have participants in Viet Nam, Thailand and Cambodia. I'm in the Philippines right now. The goal of the project is to improve the knowledge, skills and confidence of women and LGBTQI+ technical staff. We plan to do that by online training and mentoring and research support. Next.
So the difference of the Switch Sea project with other capacity building activities is we focus more on empowering every participant by giving them the opportunity to consciously reflect where they are right now, what are they doing, what are their activities, and then what are your strengths and weaknesses. And what are the personal goals they would like to focus on. Next is ownership. We are giving them the opportunity to own their learning, how they are going to do their capacity building activities and when they are going to start. Next.
So from the training plan or training plan development and community consultation here are our results. We invited 1600 participants. Here are the demographics of our participants. Please note that they came from around 52 organizations. They selected around 300 plus training courses and they are from 46 providers. One of which is APNIC academy.
So know that APNIC is not everything for everyone. There are courses not offered in APNIC. And if the participants would like to take courses in another provider, we are supporting that in this project.
Next. So the selected courses that the participants selected here are the topics or the knowledge areas identified. Security, network operations, Internet crowding. We also selected some from the soft skills but not so soft skills, management, English and public speaking and also disaster management.
Next. So aside from enrolling them in courses, we also supported ‑‑ we also have mentoring support. We enrolled them in a platform where they get to be matched with a mentor somewhere in another part of the globe. We also have group mentoring about leadership and professional development.
And next we also have by request if they are ‑‑ they have technical topics that they would like to focus on. We also invite technical experts. Next. We also fund their researchers, if they are competing network operations research that needed funding. Next and also one of the unique, unique activities of Switch Sea is the Asia engagement where we kind of know or sort of know the environment in which the participants are in to identify the challenges and opportunities for a more inclusive workforce in the Internet industry. So we engaged HR to their staff policies and other professional support that they are doing in the company. Next.
So here are the progress. We are now funding six researchers and then engaged with human resources. And for the courses, it increased from 315. We added more courses, like 248 courses. 78% have started their journey or courses and 55% of which are already completed.
Next. So now for the lessons learned, the lessons learned I will be sharing the first stage of the project. First is the project planning. So initial sort of activities of the project are geared for a face to face and in‑country and activities. So the project planning we had to concentrate still in the goals but had to transition to a face to face, all online approach in order to reach those schools.
Next in the preparation and community consultations stage, we learned the importance of leveraging existing networks, network operators group, contacts and directory to reach participants, to be in contact with the participants and even in getting us, the national coordinators. In the selection process I think this is an advantage where the ‑‑ in the confirmation of participants, it did not limit us from confirming them as long as they have the Internet connectivity. Next.
For the participation of the participants, the course providers that they selected we learned that they are also experiencing challenges in shifting online. The course providers that we were able to get with are only those that have already successfully shifted to online offerings. And we also learned that there are challenges with our participants, especially in courses only offered in English.
And then some of the challenges encountered by our participants, some of them experienced COVID. Some have connectivity and power outages problem. So we are having mentoring sessions but then they will be disconnected because of these challenges. Work life and professional development balance, some are stressed. Zoom and online fatigue are also there as part of the challenges.
And we also learned that a lot of them, actually most of them chose self‑paced courses. And then part of what we are collecting is disability and advocacy activities. So here we collect their activities, like when they share, they apply their knowledge. They attend to conference and we see that aside from taking in knowledge, it is equally important for us to collect and see how are they being visible and being active. May it be in the company, internationally, or local setting that they are. It is equally important to know if they are being visible. Next.
I think this is the ‑‑ my last slide. For the ‑‑ some of the lessons learned also, the importance of community support, we learned that here that we ask for the company to sign also our agreement for them to know that the participants are embarking on this journey. We learned the importance of their support, the mentor support and other participants support for these participants to continue.
We also developed a community portal for us to interact and socialize. Monthly check‑ins to know how the participants are doing are also effective. And empathetic communication, the only way we can connect is through Zoom or e‑mails. It is important to be sensitive in what they are encountering and how we communicate with them. We invited them in a welcoming gathering and gave them gifts and some of the feedback said these gifts made them realize that they are parting of something, that the Switch Sea project is really existing, though it is only in the virtual world. These are good feedbacks. And yeah. So welcome gathering and gifts.
So next slide. So those are the activities of Switch Sea and some lessons learned. So hopefully we can discuss more in the Q and A later. Thank you.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks very much, Maria. That was great. Sorry. Just turning off the presentation. So we did have some questions which I will read out and I know that the questions have been answered on the chat. But just for the purpose of the recording and also for people who are in the physical room, let's have those answers out, voiced out as well, that would help. So the first question was for Masaki, who invested to buy the tablet for every student in your training model?
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: That's leadership by the central Government.
>> JOYCE CHEN: This was for the duration of the entire training or a one‑off that they gave the tablets? It is year after year?
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: So that's one‑off. This is the first challenge in Japan. Yeah. So maybe I think five years later maybe I think the Government must provide the new machine to student. Because the machine is aging, right?
>> JOYCE CHEN: Exactly. That's where cost is involved. We had another question for Tashi which is do you plan to provide online or remote training courses in local languages? As you may know English is a target challenge for some in the community.
>> TASHI PHUNTSHO: Let me compliment. Our online APNIC academy we have support for eight to ten languages in the region. Most of the online contents are multilingual contents. But for instructional led training, like I have alluded to in the chat, APNIC also runs this voluntary community trainers' program where we request engineers who are active in the community to share their experience and knowledge. If I'm teaching in Mongolia, if we are teaching we request the Mongolian engineers to help us out. And where there is need for translation during the Q and A sessions or difficult ‑‑ related to difficult concept that needs further explaining we rely on our community trainers to help us out. And where we don't have community trainers, ideally we would like one per economy, that would be 56 of them. But because of the scale we don't have that much. We rely on local partners like NGOs or local hosts to give us some local champions who are willing to help us.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks. I don't see any questions or comments at the moment from the chat. I don't know if there are any in the room. Jennifer will help us with that. Let me pose a question to all of you. What do you think are the long‑term effects of the changes that you encounter to your work or to your project, or what do you think are the long‑term effects of the outcomes of your work? Maybe Maria, you want to go first?
>> MARIA THERESA PEREZ: Sure. So I think if we continue to adopt an online delivery, there is a possibility to expand the project in number also with the participants from different locations, as long as they have Internet connection. And for the challenges, to address the challenge of not having, even sort of not having so much of a human connection, maybe we can explore ways in to how we can better address those issues and challenges.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Just a follow‑up question to Maria, do you think for your project it will ever go back to face to face when people are able to travel and they can meet up? Or do you think it is going to continue as an online sort of project?
>> MARIA THERESA PEREZ: Based on what I know, there are really plans of extending the project. And most of the ideation or the proposals are really for an online, still an online approach until we sort of have clear COVID cases for each of the countries. But we would love to be with the participants, yes.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks very much. How about Masaki Umejima?
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: Yes. Everyone thinks the full drive of distance learning to understand the connectivity is the most important parameter.
So the quality of the Internet, the speed is very important. On the other hand, I learned I think, in my study you know Japan is a rich country I think. But 5% of junior high school students and I think elementary school students could not have the Internet access in the home. That's what's surprising me. So I think we must think about affordability of the Internet access seriously I think. That's learning from my case. Thank you.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thank you. And I have to say I myself I am very surprised. His eyes was very wide open that 5% still doesn't have access. It is a myth or a misconception that a very developed economy like Japan will have a population that doesn't have access yet. So it is a very chilling, but I think a lot of work needs to be done I think in this area.
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: I think that's really U.S. and Korea or something else. We must think about affordability of the Internet access. That is I think an important parameter I think.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Tashi, what do you think?
>> TASHI PHUNTSHO: I would like to echo Masaki here. That's a surprise. But we assume that Japan being a developed economy and all. But you are absolutely right. What we are trying to do because of similar challenges in our part of the world where sometimes we have seen half the class disappear and turns out their data cap, most of them seem to have data capped broadband connection. The class disappeared and we are like what did we do. They had come back 30 minutes later and they had gone and recharged their connection. I have quite a connection there. Good friends there. So I have been trying to leverage and convince our program to put this research network, to extend it to every high school, every primary school. We are in the Himalayas and it is really good to see that they have bought about 240 routers just to connect all the tiny community schools in the mountains. So definitely I think.
But back to Joyce's original question of how does it impact our work in the long run, I will be very honest, just because of the nature of what we teach or how we teach things, again the fact that we are teaching engineers, I think it is very, very difficult. I think if you are a new engineer or a student or relatively mid level engineer, I think we can help with our online courses, with our self‑paced learning courses on the academy. If you are a mid level or senior engineer who would like to discuss deployment issues with us I think the online setup is not working for us.
Two weeks ago, that was the first trip this year, we had the most traveled people in APNIC for this year. We did one trip to Perth. It was amazing. We hardly talked. We discussed the whole day. We found out critical issues. APNIC's portal works which we won't have found in an online set up. We found it only because people were willing to have those corridor chats with us, coffee break chats with us. I'm not too sure how to balance this out honestly.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks for being honest about the challenges that you face and trying to overcome them. And maybe sometimes the solution is not trying to overcome everything. You want to try and balance and see if you can go back to a kind of maybe not online only but a hybrid form of learning.
One more question I have would be having said all this, how do you think inclusion has been affected with all this online learning, with having to engage people online, do you think people ‑‑ do you think we are more inclusive now because of being connected online? Or do you think actually, you know, inclusion has been impeded in some way? Who would like to go first? Nobody wants to try going first.
>> TASHI PHUNTSHO: Let me try. Inclusion, I think the most obvious one seems to be able we should be able to reach those who have not been reachable. I think there is validity there because not everyone can afford to fly to a common location where there is a conference happening, be it an APNIC conference, be it NGOs. For those people and especially now parts of the world again, in some smaller companies you are the one man or one woman who everything relies on. If you go away on leave the whole company collapses or network collapses. For those people they have ‑‑ we see those faces that we would hardly see in conferences now showing up for our online sessions. And I totally value that.
But on the other side, what we are also seeing is this repeat group of people rocking up at every online session we do, whether we do it for UTC plus 13 time zone, we see one from UTC plus 4 up at that session because they were free after work or early before they went to work because their bosses wouldn't let them. Because during online when you are listening to someone's training and your colleagues drag you away or your boss drags you away, many people prefer to do it during the weekends or evenings. We have had requests to host on weekends. I see value in both.
Like you said earlier, even after we go back to normal, whenever that is, I think we need to balance out. We need to cater to yes, from an interaction point of view, face to face, in‑ person seemed to work great, but like I said what about those that don't get a chance. Do we ‑‑ do we cater to them? Like we said we need to continue doing online or hybrid approaches while trying to do in‑person for specific topics that we might need to do. But I think we would continue wanting to do online steps also, yes.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks, Tashi. How about Maria? I think you alluded to this. Maybe you want to elaborate a bit more on it.
>> MARIA THERESA PEREZ: I agree with Tashi about being able to participate more, given that you are in an online setting. And I also agree that maybe we are leaving some out, those that don't have the connection. What I can add to that especially because we are a project that is targeting gender inclusivity, for this project, if we are concentrating to projects with more inclusive engendered we hope that this project and maybe the next iterations would increase women participation by having more women with certifications and pushing for active ‑‑ to be more active in the community work or industry. We also hope that this kind of project would increase inclusion in diversity and in gender.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks. Such a great answer.
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: Yes, I think that your question is very good but difficult to answer. Yes. But I think from my experience I think that I can say one thing. And then I think, of course, I think if I saw the face‑to‑face lesson and I think that distance learning to the student, the student will choose face to face because I think my case target, I think junior high school and the elementary school student, but I think I want to say one interesting experience. Now I think a student shares their digital note with the teacher.
So when a student receives the answer from ‑‑ from the teacher overseas, the student I think get ‑‑ got very excited. Oh, my God. And then the teacher in Philippines comment on my note kind of thing. In the distance learning we bring another opportunity. For example, telling diversity of the, I think, people to the student. That kind of thing. I think ‑‑ I can create and I think the new opportunity for student I think.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks very much. What I'm hearing from all of you is in general yes, it sounds like, you know, inclusion and diversity will increase by design. Being online means many different people from different parts of the region or world are able to dial in. The IGF as it is now in the hybrid format is a case example. If you couldn't fly to Katowice in Poland, at least now we have the option to run the session online and still be able to participate anyway. So from that view, it does sound like inclusion will increase. At the same time I think we do compromise a bit on having that face‑to‑face interaction which is something quite different when we engage people. And we are able to to do it in person. Our friends who are now sitting in the room in Katowice I'm sure you have a feeling about how it is like to be there in the room having to listen to us. And, of course, if you have any questions, whether you can put it in the chat or you can say it on the mic, feel free to do so. We also want to make sure that you feel included. It is not just online only session.
So I don't see any other comments or questions at the moment either. So I'll get down to maybe asking one last question, which is what do you think are some lessons that we can learn from these educational models, whether it is about the delivery, whether it is about the interaction? Maria, do you want to go first? I know in your presentation the last few slides you do put some notes there about the lessons learned. What would you prioritize as like the top one or two important lessons that you have taken away?
>> MARIA THERESA PEREZ: For the educational models, I think the opportunity to own one's learning journey is crucial to achieving one's personal development goals. So that's one.
And also another component of the project that I discussed I think engaging the HR in the conversation gives us a more wholistic view of the capacity building efforts that we need ‑‑ that we need to give to the participants or to a person. And it is also good to know if those capacity building activities are aligned to the organization or are there other approaches that we can explore. So those things I think are good learning opportunities.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks, Maria. Next Tashi, would you like to try going next?
>> TASHI PHUNTSHO: Yes. Thanks again. Lessons or take‑aways from the last 18 or 19 months, quite difficult to put it there. But I think what we are learning on honestly is we would definitely want to continue with our remote online deliveries. Maybe up to an intermediate level so that we can free up in‑person, face‑to‑face interactions for more real hands‑on deployment specific kind of discussions. That way it would also allow us to scale because we have to cater to 56 economies in this region. So online allows us. We can't fly to every event globally. Example, I don't think I would be at this IGF even if this was happening in person honestly just because of the nature of the work in the office.
So at least continue with that but I think not forget the fact that in‑person or face to face allows ‑‑ helps us definitely with technology deployments or validation of people's deployments. So yeah, Joyce, the lesson for us if we would like to continue with both but to cater to different scopes of what we do. Yeah.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks, Tashi.
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: Yes. And then I think my learning and then handoff. And then maybe we should not compare face to face and the remote machine learning. And then I think, of course, face to face has good things. But on the other hand, remote learning has a good thing. So I think ‑‑ but I think when we implement the remote learning, the Internet connectivity is very important. Plus affordability to the Internet access is very important. Those two factors will be I think highlighted when we address I think the distance learning environment to be more ideal I think.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thank you. And finally, I would like to pose a question, the same question. So what lessons can we learn from these educational models or what lessons have you learned from your own personal experiences to the audience? So whether online or for the people who are in the room, if you would like to share your experiences in this area, and your thoughts around it, we would love to hear from you. I will wait a few seconds to see if any brave soul would like to take the mic.
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: My name is Chris Buckridge. I'm working for the RIPE. I want to commend the final messages that we heard there from each of the three speakers because I think it really echos strongly with what RIPENIC has heard and felt about our educational activities in this period.
What we have done, like the other APNIC has fallen back to a remote model. And it is meant that that model, that remote teaching that we've done has really evolved significantly in the last two years. And that's been really important. And I think it particularly, we also have a very broad and diverse service region, and they are always part of that service region that we are getting remote education, that we couldn't always send people in person. I think this really helps those parts, more remote parts of the world because it has levelled up the kind of remote teaching capacity that all of us have and that's really important thing.
I think to Mia's point about owning the education journey or goals, I think that's also something we've come to understand better in this period. And it sort of informed the way that we developed the courses. And we are doing these new certified professionals programs. It is giving people more digital certification of their education and their courses that they have done and ways to understand that.
And then finally the point about we absolutely can't compare apples and oranges in terms of remote and face to face. They are going to be different. It is not going to be a situation where remote can replace face to face or capture everything. But it does offer opportunities for so much more as well. So we're understanding this sort of ‑‑ the importance of maintaining both and developing both. I really enjoyed the session and hearing the experiences. So thanks, everyone.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thanks very much, Chris. That's lovely to hear and thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I think we have someone from Katowice who would like to speak. Please introduce yourself.
>> Hi. This is Carole from the Bahamas. I think with the online training I work for the Government of The Bahamas in the IT department. And the pandemic has allowed executives to be more open to paying for subscriptions for training programs. It has been very useful to us because now we have ‑‑ whereas we struggle to get one subscription, we now have two subscriptions for our employees to use. It is a struggle to get persons to give up their time to complete courses because they are having to, as one of the presenters said, they are having to do work as well as training. So whereas if you had it on a face to face, the person was actually removed from their work environment. And they went off to do a class. So there was no interruptions. There is good and bad in advantages and disadvantages in both means of training. So that's just my input.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thank you so much I believe it was Carole for sharing your thoughts about this. And I do agree. I think a lot of people have been using the term Zoom fatigue or whichever platform that you are using or whether Microsoft Teams or proprietary platform. The idea that we have so many online meetings is one thing. The fact that you cannot physically just devote that time to just one thing happening.
So, for example, if this IGF event we are attending it in person, we would all be fully dedicated to just a conference. You are not ‑‑ you are not multi‑tasking, trying to do other things at the same time. So I think in the session, what I'm hearing is a lot of people having a very shared common experience around the impact of the pandemic. And having that sort of ‑‑ that sharing of experiences across what we have been doing in the course of our work. I think it is the same as well for the users that we are in touch with.
So I'm very grateful for all your time. I don't know if there are any other people who want to make any comments. Give any feedback. So I think in the physical room I don't see anyone at the mic nor in the chat. So I think we are almost due for closing. Just a few minutes left. And what I would like to do is invite my speakers again to just give your final thoughts, maybe one or two lines, your key take‑aways that you hope people will be able to take back with them from the session.
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: Yep. I think on remote learning maybe can change I think our ‑‑ the education scheme. So I think anyway, just do it. That's my message.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thank you. That's succinct and very to the point. Thank you. Thank you for being here with us today all the way from Japan. Next how about Mia.
>> MARIA THERESA PEREZ: So my message, maybe it will be long. So better eyes on the goals may be increasing inclusivity in gender. And do necessary adjustments to these new realities. It is a very challenging time and we can't do this alone. If we need to virtually hold hands and collaborate with each other, like we do in this session, we share and discuss our best practices, hopefully by persisting and collaborating we will be in a better place than we started. That's my take. Thank you.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thank you. And finally, Tashi.
>> TASHI PHUNTSHO: Well, yes. As they stated, for me if we are the ones delivering content, maybe focus on shorter sessions, that seems to work really well. I think we all keep forgetting the same audience is being targeted as others. And no wonder the Zoom fatigue world has become so popular because we are all targeting the same audience. Thank you.
>> JOYCE CHEN: Thank you, Tashi, for joining us even though it is ten minutes to midnight for you and having you stay up for this. Thank you and appreciate you as well. So I will close the session here with two minutes left to the end. I thank you all for your participation. Thank you for dialling in. Those of you who joined us despite the main session going on I appreciate you being here with us.
>> MASAKI UMEJIMA: Thank you for your great coordination.
>> Thank you.
>> Thanks everyone.
>> Thank you.
>> Good‑bye.
>> Good‑bye.
>> Thanks.
>> Bye‑bye.
>> Have a good night, everyone.
>> Thank you.