In 2020 LeWiBo arranged 10 webinars on viruses and viral diseases for high school and university students worldwide.
During the COVID-19 pandemic LeWiBo organized, in partnership with JOGL https://app.jogl.io/, a webinar series on viruses and viral diseases for high school students worldwide. The webinars aimed to help students understand what viruses are and how they can make us sick and then took place in Romania, Germany, Colombia, Poland, Argentina, Russia and India.
lobal online webinars on virology in partnership with JOGL
During 2020, millions of high-school and university students all over the world were forced to stay at home and rely on online tools for their education. With this project, we aimed to empower students not only to understand the outbreak of COVID-19 but also to get a broader understanding of biology, scientific research, epidemiology, drug discovery, vaccine development and all the challenges and limitations of our current knowledge. We tried to encourage critical thinking and allow them to become active themselves in educating others, showing them how they can contribute to reduce these social problems.
We developed a series of webinars in English, Spanish and French. Current advances in COVID-19 research were presented along with - and as an example of - broader concepts related to viral diseases: why and how diseases spread, how scientists try to understand them, what are the biggest challenges in "finding a cure" and why epidemics tend to be hard to predict.
Students were invited by their institutions and the team in LeWiBo coordinated all activities, adapting the content to the specific requests of each institution and to the prior knowledge of the students. The webinars were interactive and the students had the opportunity to send questions beforehand in order to actively participate in determining the content of each session.
Link to external page: https://app.jogl.io/project/216