The Transnational Meeting in Dhaka was combining two meetings due to the cancelled ones during the pandemic. Our consortium has worked uninterruptedly during the pandemic but resources available for project work have been limited. Our partners in Bangladesh and Vietnam have been obliged to participate in pandemic work at the healthcare field. A situation which has affected us but hasn’t broken us. However, it did reduce the possibilities to work with project tasks and activities and the development of outputs have been significantly delayed.
Where the delays have affected us, there are also means to rectify and accelerate the project work. Fortunately, we have a toolkit of active and collaborative working methods which will surely rekindle the flame of enthusiasm and creativity wherever needed.
The form of working methods in Dhaka meeting were selected based on interactivity, cooperation and collaboration. We utilized parallel small group workshops with pretasks as a preparation for the workshops and world cafees in even smaller groups. By enlisting preliminary tasks for each workshop we were able to limit presentations and save time for active collaborative work.
We also used short orientation presentations prior to workshops, chatting groups and debates and defenses of own perspectives. We did decide not to leave the venue before we had reached a certain synthesis and consensus on the conceptual framework for the refined DigiCare Model.
It did take some luring to get all participants involved in the group discussions and debates, but the results were wonderful. As one of our participants expressed: “I have never worked like this before, this was really something different”. Hard work but very satisfying.
Furthermore, the Digicare Model also got some different and new perspectives which were generated by world cafe results, discussions and debates. The justifications of one’s own views did test the soundness of the model structure.
The model nor the teachers’ and students’ learning packages don’t have to be in their final illustrative or narrative form yet but the innovative and creative work took a huge leap towards final outputs.
The similar leap was taken in working habits of our consortium and we will continue working interactively and collaboratively to engage everybody’s expertise and competency to the fullest.
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