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Description
E-education in Bulgaria has still not achieved the necessary quality, taking account in particular the importance of distance learning and the risk of a new wave of coronavirus and transfer to online classes. What is needed is stricter discipline of complying with the COVID-19 measures, greater personal hygiene and responsibility displayed by the public. COVID-19 is not only a heath issue, it is an economic, political and social issue as well. Our organization Мy Century is a platform with popular digital educational resources including videos with testimonies of the recent past. We have informal partnership with Prosveta Foundation to include our videos in the e-textbooks published by Prosveta. The project envisages creating 3 short films about tackling past health crises in Bulgaria and launching a discussion related to public health. The films with historic photos will be dedicated to the following topics: a successful vaccine against TB, containing the HIV/AIDS crisis, the challenges facing health mediators during the COVID-19 crisis. This project aims at raising awareness of the capacity of digital media to educate public opinion to help make important healthcare decision such as introducing public health topics in the school curricula. The films will benefit target groups such as the Roma community and will include good practices of the Bulgarian Roma in London. We plan to show the films in the neighbourhood of Kosharnik, Montana, and organize a discussion with the mediators in the neighbourhood with mainly Roma make-up.
Summary of project results
MyCentury.tv is a popular website which hosts videos bringing together archive film footage and eye-witness testimony to some of the biggest events of the twentieth century. It is a high-quality resource for school history teaching, and its videos are featured in the e-schoolbooks of the Prosveta publishing house.
In the project “E-lessons from history for a post-COVID-19 Bulgaria“ MyCentury produced three short videos, each looking at a past health crisis in Bulgaria and asking if lessons can be learnt from them for Bulgaria in the current pandemic. The videos each featured unique archive pictures from the National Film Archives, and interviews with people close to the events of the time.
The first video looked at the TB pandemic of the 1950s and the development of the BCG vaccine, the second featured the arrival of HIV/AIDS in Bulgaria in the 1980s and how the authorities dealt with HIV positive people. The final video looked at more recent events at the turn of this century as Roma communities dealt with their own health problems, and featured the work of health mediators in the Roma neighbourhood of Kosharnik, near the city of Montana.
All three videos were filmed and scripted to inspire questions and debate in the schoolroom and university lecture hall, and are now featured in the schoolbooks of Prosveta. They are also hosted on a number of websites for the general public to access and learn from. The project was presented in September 2021 with a special press conference in Sofia, and received widespread media coverage, sparking news-making interviews on TV, including BNT and Bloomberg, national radio networks (BNR and Darik) and local media in Montana, some interviews inspired by the low vaccination rates in Bulgaria for Covid-19, with others focussed on the role digital education can play in the future.
Sustainability: The products of our project, the three educational films, are already online and will remain freely available as a resource, encouraging discussions on public health between teachers and pupils within e-schoolbooks.
The website of the organisation is: https://mycentury.tv