Online Training of Youth Club Members of Ukraine in Projecting

Volunteer Activities in the Conditions of the Spread of COVID-19

Oleksandr G. Kucheryaviy

1 a

, Dmytro G. Gryshchuk

2 b

and Olena G. Glazunova

3 c

Ivan Ziaziun Institute of Pedagogical and Adult Education of the NAES of Ukraine, 9 Maksyma Berlynskoho Str., Kiev,

04060, Ukraine

University of Educational Management, 52A Sichovykh Striltsiv Str., Kyiv, 04053, Ukraine

National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, 15 Heroiv Oborony Str., Kyiv, 03041, Ukraine

Keywords:

Online Education, Volunteer Activity, Volunteer Activity Projecting, COVID-19, Youth Clubs, Volunteers’

Projecting Competencies, Volunteer Activity Projecting Readiness.

Abstract:

The article deals with the features of the solution of the problem of value and meaning content and the method-

ology of online training of young people (platforms: Zoom, Moodle, Google Classroom, etc.) to project

volunteer actions in the situation of a global coronavirus pandemic. A certiﬁcate is submitted concerning

the acquisition by youth club members of previous experience of spiritual, patriotic and online design activ-

ities. The volunteer project competences framework as a target for relevant online learning is highlighted.

The following guiding principles for the development of its content are deﬁned, namely: dominance of on-

line – providing motivation for the activity of young people in the creation of socially signiﬁcant volunteer

projects; priority in the content of the basis of knowledge about information and communication technologies,

project method, gerontology, psychotherapy, psycho-hygiene, self-organization, health culture and readiness

for volunteer action in crisis conditions, continuity of content of online education of volunteers by means of

self-preservation of personality, preventing and overcoming panic, fear and anxiety in a situation; personal ori-

entation and emotionally-sensual saturation of the methodology of online support of subjects of the projecting

volunteer activity, etc. Based on these principles, emphasis is placed on the value and meaning potential of

the projected experimental special course. The sum of two groups of humanistic methods online-preparation

of young people to create volunteer projects is deﬁned, namely: 1) methods of motivation and organization

of volunteer project action; 2) methods of stimulation of projecting activity of young volunteers. Attention is

paid to the features of the experimental testing of the special course and methodology, and to the criteria for

assessing the readiness of youth club members to the create the volunteer projects.

1 INTRODUCTION

The challenges posed by the COVID-19 lockdown

(Polhun et al., 2021) have largely affected NGOs, par-

ticularly those involved in the volunteer movement.

According to a survey conducted by the Democratic

Initiatives Foundation in the spring of 2020, more

than 80% of respondents conﬁrmed a certain impact

of the coronavirus pandemic on public activity. It was

also found that the “non-virtual” activity of citizens

in creating a real social product had decreased. It’s

about “what can be done with your hands and feet.

But this activity has moved, in particular, to the Inter-

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5469-0949

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2284-3706

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0136-4936

net” (dif.org.ua, 2020). Comparing the current growth

rate and scope of civic activity in Ukraine with that in

2014–2015, it can be concluded that the ﬁrst year of

the pandemic did not see a signiﬁcant surge in vol-

unteerism, for example, there was no large-scale re-

gional movement to ﬁght the coronavirus infection.

This was due to the following factors: the “second

war”, the prompt actions of the state in a crisis sit-

uation, the unknown viral danger, its scale, and the

COVID-19 information policy, etc.

Our study explored the level of social activity

of youth organization members in Ukraine. The

COVID-19 pandemic requires ﬁnding effective ways

to organize the work of youth associations, as well as

to radically transform the youth association members’

training in providing assistance to people, in particu-

Kucheryaviy, O., Gryshchuk, D. and Glazunova, O.

Online Training of Youth Club Members of Ukraine in Projecting Volunteer Activities in the Conditions of the Spread of COVID-19.

DOI: 10.5220/0010920000003364

In Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology (AET 2020) - Volume 1, pages 5-13

ISBN: 978-989-758-558-6

lar via the Internet.

The effectiveness of IT-based traditional learning

is measured primarily by the educational result, which

is associated with students’ personal and professional

development and, consequently, their competent and

charitable social activity especially during the global

upheavals.

In the context of the COVID-19 lockdown on-

line education becomes the sole and reliable means of

training people in active science-based counteraction

to the coronavirus pandemic (Semerikov et al., 2020).

There is no doubt about the urgency of such train-

ing for students in the systems of secondary, high,

higher, and postgraduate education, as well as in the

systems of non-formal adult education and youth or-

ganizations, etc. The volunteer potential of youth or-

ganizations remains far from being fully explored.

The least represented in the scientiﬁc discourse

are the theoretical principles of future volunteers’

distance training and online development of youth

club members’ readiness for the development and

implementation of volunteer projects to help people

during the lockdown. This should be done to im-

prove youth volunteers’ ineffective work in some re-

gions of Ukraine in 2020. Thus, youth volunteer

activities were not aimed at normalizing the mental

and emotional condition of people with low stress-

resistance and increased anxiety and were not based

on the achievements of gerontology, gerontopsychol-

ogy and other sciences when interacting with the

elderly, and special psychological, pedagogical and

medical knowledge when interacting with children

with disabilities. This was due to the young volun-

teers’ lack of competencies in the system planning

and implementation of appropriate social work. In

fact, there is a contradiction between the social de-

mand for youth organizations’ (formal and informal)

high competence in providing effective volunteer as-

sistance to people in lockdown and the youth club

managers’ unpreparedness for online work. The rea-

sons for this unpreparedness, among others, include

the lack of scientiﬁc requirements and recommenda-

tions for the content and methods of young volun-

teers’ online training. Hence, it is imperative to de-

termine the content and methods of young peoples’

online training in projecting and implementing vol-

unteer work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2 RELATED WORKS AND

LITERATURE REVIEW

The system of psychological and pedagogical prin-

ciples and recommendations for ﬁghting coronavirus

infection, which is very important for youth volun-

teering during the lockdown, has been updated in the

online manual “Psychology and pedagogy in ﬁghting

the COVID-19 pandemic” (Kremen, 2020). Kabysh-

Rybalka (Kabysh-Rybalka, 2020) has formulated the

psychological principles of volunteer work to check

the disease spread and promote hygienic care during

the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the rules for safe

and effective behavior in the lockdown.

The methodology, theory and improvement of

social projecting in the broadest sense have been

the subjects of close consideration by a number of

scientists in the late twentieth century (Antonyuk,

1986). Particular attention to social projects has

been paid by Bezpalko (Bezpalko, 2010) (basic ap-

proaches to social projecting and its features; de-

velopment, text design and implementation of social

projects); Pometun (Pometun, 2003) (training young

people in social project implementation); Lesnikova

(Lesnikova, 2005) (promoting adolescents’ social ini-

tiative through project activities).

Our study was guided by the theoretical princi-

ples of ICT-based learning (Gurzhii and Bykov, 1980;

Papert, 1987; Polat, 2004; Robert et al., 2017; Spirin

et al., 2019). The aim of the study was to explore the

content, principles and methods of distance education

with the use of special technologies. Unfortunately,

the use of information and communication technolo-

gies (ICT) in volunteers’ training, especially in con-

ditions of a lockdown, has not received an in-depth

coverage in scientiﬁc literature. Moreover, the manu-

als, books and guides, the volunteer movement orga-

nizers used in their work even before the pandemic,

were few and quite superﬁcial.

Responding to current challenges, educational in-

stitutions in Ukraine have to revisit distance learn-

ing technologies. According to the Shevchenko

(Shevchenko, 2020), there is an urgent need for teach-

ers’ training in using special educational programs,

such as Moodle (Mintii, 2020), Google Classroom

(Bondarenko et al., 2020), Google Hangouts, Mi-

crosoft Teams, Skype, Cisco Webex, etc (Pavlenko

and Pavlenko, 2021). It should be noted that a

number of educational institutions have developed

specialized online systems, in particular, based on

cloud technologies (e.g., the Electronic Campus

(https://ecampus.kpi.ua/) on the basis of the National

Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic

Institute named after Igor Sikorsky”) to store teaching

materials and organize online teachers-students com-

munication (KPI, 2020). Although online education

has a number of drawbacks (Polonska, 2020; Morska,

2020; Song et al., 2004), it has also unarguable ad-

vantages (Cojocariu et al., 2014; Singh and Thurman,

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

2019; Vlasenko et al., 2020). However, the distinctive

features of young volunteers’ online training have not

attracted Ukrainian researchers’ attention yet.

Aim: to discuss the theoretical basis, content, tools

and results of the experimental online program aimed

at developing Ukrainian youth club members’ readi-

ness to project volunteer activities during the COVID-

19 pandemic.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 Background Information on the

Work of Youth Territorial Clubs

Falcons before and at the Outbreak

of the Pandemic

The network of youth territorial clubs Falcons (here-

inafter clubs Falcons) began operating in 2015 as a

statutory activity of the public organization Love. The

clubs were set up in many schools in a number of re-

gions of Ukraine.

The main goal of the youth territorial clubs Fal-

cons is the promotion of spiritual and patriotic educa-

tion of adolescents and youth by means of various ed-

ucational programs (e.g., the Cossack Magazine and

The Pages of Eternal Stories programs). The main

values that are fostered in the “falcons” include faith

in God, love for Ukraine and respect for its history,

language, and culture, brotherhood and sisterhood,

high motivation for social work in the community, pu-

rity of body, soul and intersex relations, respect for the

elderly, mercy for the needy, and patience for the lit-

tle ones. The club members’ leading activity is plan-

ning, organizing and conducting social projects dur-

ing the year. Before the pandemic, the results of the

work were presented and evaluated in the form of a

team competition at the annual Falcon Games, where

the winners were determined and future projects were

presented to apply for a grant. During the sum-

mer, club members were involved in holding summer

camps for young local community members, during

which the “falcons” developed such important char-

acter traits as purposefulness, resilience, leadership,

responsibility, and communication. In July, the most

active club member took part in a summer falconry

camp, where they could continue their patriotic, civic

and spiritual training.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed serious chal-

lenges to the Falcons clubs. The letter of the Min-

istry of Education and Science of Ukraine of April

4, 2020 “On the organization of the educational pro-

cess in out-of-school educational institutions during

the lockdown” recommended to develop measures for

partial use of telework and, if possible, for conduct-

ing educational classes, including, hobby groups, by

means of online technologies (MON, 2020).

Until March 2020, social projecting was part of

weekly meetings of club members with their leaders

or mentors. The clubs’ work was built on the close co-

operation between the falcons, as well as with the ad-

ministrations and students of educational institutions,

and the residents of territorial communities. However,

in mid-March 2020, after the imposed lockdown, the

activities of the Falcons clubs stopped. The lockdown

was felt by absolutely all public organizations. As a

matter of urgency, most organizations that focused on

direct contact with the population had to limit their

activities.

Members of the Love NGO immediately refo-

cused on the volunteer movement. Thus, during

March-April 2020, a pilot project Second Wing –

Food Delivery as part of the local volunteer initia-

tive Do Not Be Indifferent was launched to deliver

food and medicines to the elderly who are at risk of

COVID-19 in the town of Irpin. Under this project,

more than 100 families were visited by the Falcons

club members. In addition to delivering food and

medicines, the falcons had short talks with care-

receivers on the basic safety rules to reduce the risk

of infection. Besides, the elderly were given religious

support by pastors of the local Christian community.

As part of the Second Wing project, in May 2020,

young people from the Kyiv-city Falcons club visited

a social hostel for graduates of a specialized board-

ing school for visually impaired children. The hos-

tel residents were given material (food and antisep-

tics) and psychological assistance (friendly commu-

nication and answers to the questions about safe life

in crisis conditions).

Unfortunately, the morbidity rate in Ukraine did

not improved, it even worsened, which required better

project activities of club members as volunteers and

their greater competence in this matter.

3.2 The 2020 Falcons Club’s

Zoom-based Project, the Camp

Maker

This project was created in order to develop club

members’ project activity experience. After all sum-

mer events were canceled in the spring of 2020 due to

the spread of COVID-19, club members were invited

to take part in a special project.

The management of Love NGO chose a con-

venient and easy-to-use Zoom platform to develop,

organize and implement The Camp Maker project,

Online Training of Youth Club Members of Ukraine in Projecting Volunteer Activities in the Conditions of the Spread of COVID-19

which was aimed at involving club members in plan-

ning the activities of a day-camp, which has become

traditional in recent years. While previously the fal-

cons had been active participants and helpers in day-

camps, that time they were invited to author the event

program made up of the camp mission, planned activ-

ities, their schedule, team organization, etc.

All participants were divided into three large

teams. Each team had two weeks to prepare and

present a special project to the judges. There were

three such projects, so the team-members worked to-

gether for 6 weeks. The teams had to prepare:

1. The camp’s business card. This task included

group work on the name, advertisement, logo, and

the general concept of the future camp. It was also

important to substantiate the choice.

2. The camp’s organization. This task included

counselor work schedule, a daily routine, and an

event plan.

3. The camp case. The teams had to prepare a draft

advertising campaign in the local community, the

list of necessary equipment and materials for var-

ious clubs (stations), and a camp estimate.

During two weeks, team members met on the

Zoom platform to work together. Each team was

given a free hand in choosing a teamwork format.

Some teams preferred group-work, others were di-

vided into threes to perform different portions of the

task, while still others chose leaders to lead the work.

Once a week, online meetings of all campers were

held for general communication, data exchange, and

interim reports.

The best project received a grant in accordance

with the camp’s budget, and its authors were given

an opportunity to organize a similar camp in the fu-

ture. The Zoom platform has proven itself effective in

this work.

The results of the Falcons club’s project activi-

ties allowed determining certain advantages of dis-

tance training compared to the traditional training.

These advantages included trainees’ high viral safety

through individual and/or mixed work, a higher level

of trainees’ activity in solving tasks, better opportuni-

ties for trainees’ mastering new technologies, a better

opportunity to unify falcons from different clubs and

regions of Ukraine, a good way to bypass direct per-

sonal contact restrictions, and a higher level of club

members’ psychological comfort.

3.3 The Theoretical Basis for Solving

the Problem under Consideration

The following deﬁnitions have been proposed based

on the following scientiﬁc principle: the character of

a particular activity is the basis for understanding the

content of individuals’ training and readiness for it. In

our case, we ﬁrst analyzed the character of pandemic-

speciﬁc volunteerism, the structure of social project-

ing, and the online trainers’ activities. Besides, Dy-

achenko and Kandybovich (Dyachenko and Kandy-

bovich, 1976) considered individuals’ psychological

readiness, both general and situational, for an activity

as a unity of individuals’ motivational, cognitive and

emotional characteristics.

Youth club members’ online training in projecting

volunteer activities during the COVID-19 pandemic

is a holistic educational process carried out under the

guidance of a distance counselor by means of spe-

cial tools (Zoom, Moodle, Google Classroom, Google

Docs, etc.). The main aim of this training is the devel-

opment of trainees’ readiness to create and implement

socially signiﬁcant projects to help people in avoiding

a viral disease.

The appropriate readiness, which includes moral,

psychological and practical components, is a com-

plex quality of a young person and an indicator of

his/her ability to mobilize their vital and axiological

potentials and self-create (self-educate) for spiritual

and moral purposes in order to act adequately in the

pandemic.

The volunteers’ holistic practical readiness to cre-

ate a socially signiﬁcant project in the pandemic is

provided by their basic project competencies, which

include: the ability to develop a logical organizational

structure of the volunteer project; the ability to take

the initiative and generate innovative ideas to help

people during the pandemic; the ability to generate

humanistic volunteer projects; the ability to develop

a project based on the information about survival rate

and economic downturn of people at risk; the abil-

ity to provide develop projects to help the community

members adapt to the pandemic restriction; the abil-

ity to use different work forms, methods and means

to get the best results from the volunteer efforts; the

ability to ﬁnd the necessary project resources and to

plan and supervise the project’s implementation.

Trainees’ volunteer project-making readiness can

be developed using the systemic, synergetic, axiolog-

ical, competence, andragogical, personality, activity,

and phenomenological approaches.

Theoretical and methodological analysis and syn-

thesis allowed formulating the following principles of

online development of youth club members’ readiness

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

for volunteer activities projecting during the COVID-

19 pandemic: online motivation of young people for

creating socially signiﬁcant volunteer projects; the fo-

cus of young volunteers’ online education on commu-

nication technologies, project method, gerontopsy-

chology, psychotherapy, psychohygiene, creativity,

health culture and willingness to volunteer during the

pandemic; the regular update of the content of vol-

unteers’ online education by new information on per-

sonal self-preservation and on panic, fear and anxiety

management; the well-balanced analyses of volun-

teers’ experience in projecting programs to help chil-

dren with disabilities, the elderly and people infected

with coronavirus; provision of personal online sup-

port for the youth club members’ volunteer activities

projecting.

Based on the above-mentioned principles, we

have developed a 36-hour-long online training course

called “Volunteer Activities Project as a Response to

the Pandemic” made up of the following modules:

1. Personal meaning of projects to help people dur-

ing the COVID-19 pandemic;

2. Essential minimum knowledge as values and

means of development of volunteer activities

projects;

3. A volunteer as a people’s mental health harmo-

nizer and an anxiety-/fear-management counselor

during the COVID-19 pandemic;

4. Projecting volunteer assistance for the elderly and

children with disabilities during the COVID-19

pandemic;

5. Medical and psychological support for projecting

serious COVID-19-patients care programs.

The content of the ﬁrst module is aimed at devel-

oping young people’s motivation for projecting vol-

unteer activities during the pandemic. Trainees’ on-

line volunteer activities projecting motivation using

special techniques is the transformation of trainees’

knowledge about the terrible consequences of coron-

avirus infection and ways and means of helping peo-

ple into the trainees’ personal values and as a result

the development of the trainees’ personal meanings

and aims of appropriate volunteer projects.

The topics of the second module have been se-

lected according to the importance of speciﬁc knowl-

edge for quality projects to ﬁght the pandemic. The

second-module topics include: “The main competen-

cies of a volunteer as an assistant to people during

the lockdown”, “The essence of social projects; the

project method and its use in volunteerism”, “Psycho-

logical support for volunteers during the lockdown”,

“Basic theoretical knowledge in valeology, gerontol-

ogy and gerontopsychology”, “The leading princi-

ples of sanitary and hygienic science, psychotherapy

and psychohygiene”, “Essential characteristics of vol-

unteers’ distance learning in the pandemic”, “Basic

volunteers’ self-education and self-development tech-

nologies”.

The third module aims at developing trainees’

skills to control their own psycho-emotional state and

to teach children and adults to preserve and harmonize

their mental health as well as manage their pandemic-

related anxiety and fear. The module trains volun-

teers to online-teach children and adults to distract

from anxious thoughts using exercise, physical activ-

ity, and/or developing their sense of beauty/aesthetic

taste. Optionally, volunteers can master special

psycho-emotional management and resilience devel-

opment techniques.

The fourth and ﬁfth modules should develop club

members’ pandemic-speciﬁc volunteer activity readi-

ness. This readiness includes club-members’:

1) help to care-receivers’ in their safe satisfaction of

their needs, such as:

(a) timely and trouble-free reception of pension;

(b) reception of food, medicine and hygiene prod-

ucts from supermarkets and pharmacies;

doctors, relatives and friends;

(d) doing hard household work;

(e) raising the general culture by online means,

etc.;

2) ability to provide safe medical assistance to peo-

ple who are self-isolated at home with a serious

form of COVID-19 infection;

3) ability to attend to children with special needs, in

particular, visually impaired children.

The methodology of the special online train-

ing used the following person-oriented and emotion-

developing techniques: a special interactive lecture,

emotionally-colored information (about the dangers

of coronavirus infection, essentials of the technol-

ogy of personal self-development, etc ﬁnding the

personal meaning of speciﬁc volunteer activities;

person-oriented approach to the educational material;

development of trainees’ positive attitudes towards

volunteer activities (positive feelings towards qual-

ity projects, knowledge of their own moral, emo-

tional and physical potentials, willingness to help

people, self-education and self-development, etc.);

trainer-trainee cooperation in creating bright images-

standards of youth readiness for volunteer activity; in-

fecting trainees with positive emotions when assess-

ing their academic progress.

Online Training of Youth Club Members of Ukraine in Projecting Volunteer Activities in the Conditions of the Spread of COVID-19

The online training project method has been up-

dated to include volunteer project development ex-

ercises. The volunteer project activity development

techniques included special online situations of spiri-

tual and moral choice, group discussions, lockdown-

speciﬁc volunteer project competition, cognitive and

assessment games, online classes conducted by coun-

selors and practitioners (psychologists, teachers, psy-

chotherapists, epidemiologists, pediatric ophthalmol-

ogists, etc.).

3.4 Experimental Veriﬁcation of the

Effectiveness of the Special Training

Course “Volunteer Activities Project

as a Response to the Pandemic”

The special online training course was tested for ef-

fectiveness at youth territorial clubs Falcons (Kyiv,

Kharkiv, Rivne, Vasylkiv, Gostomel, and Skvira). The

sample included 72 trainees who had some experience

in volunteer educational and/or social work.

The club members were offered special literature

on social projects and had to carry out a set of tasks to

develop relevant project competencies. The trainees’

self-educational and self-development activity was in

line with their project work, in particular, the on-

line project “The Social Project Maker”, which was

two months long (with general, team and individual

meetings three times a week) and used the ZOOM

platform. The trainees developed different compo-

nents of the integrated social project launching com-

petence. This required the trainers to be creative

lecturers and discussion moderators as well as en-

couragers of trainees’ innovative ideas. The trainers

listened to and initiated discussions of the trainees’

reports on volunteer activity projects, interviewed

the trainees and gave them creative tasks, combined

person-oriented lectures with case-studies on volun-

teer activity projects.

For example, D. G. Gryshchuk, besides giving

open lectures called “Basic competencies of a vol-

unteer as an assistance to people during the pan-

demic” and “The essence of social projects, the

project method and its use in volunteerism”, etc.),

shared his rich practical experience of running suc-

cessful volunteer projects, such as “The mission of

service to children is to help orphans” (Donetsk re-

gion, 2004–2006), “Good House” (Donetsk, 2011–

2013), and “Second Wing – help migrants” (Ukraine,

2014–2015). Other trainers and instructors of the Fal-

cons club and the Love NGO also shared their ex-

perience in increasing volunteers’ community activi-

ties and in changing social values of volunteering into

personal values. During the discussions, the trainees

most often asked questions about the motivational

component of volunteering, the psychological, psy-

chotherapeutic and medical care to certain groups of

the population. Often, such questions were answered

by the invited specialists (epidemiologists, psycholo-

gists, psychotherapists and others).

It should be noted that the Vasylkiv Falcons Club

(Kyiv region) and the Kyiv Falcons Club were the

winners of the 2018 and 2019 Falcons Games, re-

spectively, in the Best Social Project nomination. At

the initial stage of the online training, only one of

the three draft projects submitted for evaluation was

based on the pandemic-relevant sanitary standards,

but none of them contained a clear analysis of the

sanitary-epidemiological situation in the neighbor-

hood as a factor behind volunteerism to help those at

risk from the pandemic.

Some of the tasks the members of the experiment

had to carry out were aimed at developing collective

projects. The most conceptually interesting individ-

ual volunteer projects were those related to the psy-

chological and material support for the families of the

deceased, the assessment of urgent needs of and the

delivery of food, medicine and hygiene products to

people with disabilities. At the project presentation

stage, one of the Falcons teams stressed the impor-

tance of a free course to teach the elderly to make

online utility payments, make online drug orders, top

up cell phones online, and communicate with family

members online. Another project team presented sev-

eral online courses adapted for learning at home, city

libraries and/or social centers. One winning project

used a special program of communication with so-

cial services and local library administration. An-

other winning project, called SuperSTAR, estimated

the purchasing of four computers and special pro-

grams to improve online learning. The project, wh-

cich proved to be effective, was run for two months,

and helped 30 elderly people to develop their basic

Internet skills.

The You are Not Alone project presented to the

contest featured a fundraising program made up of a

number of special events (presentations, motivational

videos, printed materials) to raise money for hospitals

and specialized social institutions (rest homes, hos-

pices, boarding schools, psycho-neurological clinics,

etc.). The raised money was meant for buying oxygen

concentrators to help people with coronavirus. This

project also was aimed at providing targeted assis-

tance to people who stayed at home through the pur-

chase and delivery of food and medicines, and walk-

ing pets, etc.

At one of the video conferences, the partici-

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

pants of the online training noted the beneﬁts of

the information on mental health preservation dur-

ing the COVID-19 pandemic and anxiety- and fear-

management techniques (Velykodna and Frankova,

2021). The trainees also stressed that their knowledge

of the sanitary and hygienic principles and the essen-

tials of psychotherapy and psychohygiene improved

their project competencies.

Although online training had a number of ad-

vantages, it was not devoid of certain shortcomings,

which were:

• low level of psychological comfort because of in-

adequate audio and/or visual perception of other

team-members during online team work. Almost

every second project participant felt uncomfort-

able, tired, and irritated after 40 minutes of on-

line communication as a result of poor lighting,

technical failures, and inability to see and/or hear

other team-members.

• difﬁculties in moderating a large number of par-

ticipants in online discussions, brainstorming and

other organizational activities. For example, the

ZOOM platform does not allow seeing more than

25 people on a single screen, which makes it difﬁ-

cult to respond promptly to the conference partic-

ipants’ remarks and questions, which lowers the

quality of heuristic learning. The situation with

smartphones is even worse as they ﬁt no more than

four conference participants into the screen.

The experiment participants’ volunteer activity

projects were assessed according to: the degree of

the projects’ humanistic orientation (focus on satisfy-

ing the needs of the most vulnerable community res-

idents), the projects’ general concept (the way volun-

teerism is visioned during the pandemic), the scien-

tiﬁc substantiation of the proposed volunteer actions

(i.e basing the lockdown-speciﬁc volunteer activities

on the relevant principles of psychology, psychother-

apy, valeology, gerontology, and gerontopsychology;

the project teams’ ability to build their work with chil-

dren with special needs on the principles of medicine

and pedagogy, etc.); the projects’ technological char-

acter (a clear description of the stages, content, forms,

methods, means, and algorithm of volunteers’ social

activities); the projects’ logical structure (deﬁnition of

the problem(s) to be solved by the volunteer project;

presentation of the ideas about the long-term outcome

of the project; setting speciﬁc goals and objectives for

the near future; description of volunteer services to

meet the requirements of people from risk groups,

people with special needs and COVID-19 patients;

description of the projects’ resources; the projects’

schedule: the terms of and persons responsible for the

realization of each project task; youth club manage-

ment’s control over volunteers’ actions); the projects’

realism (compliance of the projects’ ﬁnancial, staff

and material resources with the possibilities of the

youth organization; the projects’ sensitivity to the pe-

culiarities of the regional social environment).

The evaluation of the projects presented by the

youth club members allowed determining the levels

of their readiness to run volunteer activities projects

during the pandemic, which were high, sufﬁcient and

low, before and after their attending the special online

course (see table 1).

As can be seen from the table, the training course

increased the total number of volunteers with sufﬁ-

cient and high levels of readiness to run volunteer

projects during the lockdown by 47.2%, in particular,

the number of those with high readiness increased by

8.3%, while the number of those with low readiness

decreased by 47.2%.

The obtained results show that the Love club

volunteers have well-developed project competencies

and can run high-quality social projects in crisis situa-

tions. All the experiment participants became deeply

aware of their volunteer assistance’s role in helping

their community residents in the lockdown, which

was demonstrated by their strong training and project-

making motivation. In particular, the vast majority

of trainees (54 people) developed the ability to set

social projects’ goals and objectives and determine

their organizational structures for at-risk groups. 57

club members (79.1% of the total number of trainees)

in their volunteer programs demonstrated knowledge

of ways to provide practical assistance to the elderly,

children with special needs, and COVID-19 patients.

The trainees had difﬁculties in generating original

conceptual ideas for their pandemic-speciﬁc volun-

teer activities, in developing online/telephone meth-

ods for maintaining the mental health of retired peo-

ple and children with special needs as well as in de-

scribing the psychological and sanitary support given

online or over the telephone to COVID-19 patients in

self-isolation.

4 CONCLUSIONS

1. Youth organization members’ distance training

during the pandemic is considered as a unique so-

cial phenomenon and a mechanism of project sup-

port for volunteerism, which is an important way

to ﬁght the pandemic. Under certain conditions,

distance training is an important factor in increas-

ing youth club members’ productive social mo-

bility as a result of increasing their willingness to

help people in difﬁcult living conditions.

Online Training of Youth Club Members of Ukraine in Projecting Volunteer Activities in the Conditions of the Spread of COVID-19

Table 1: Distribution of experiment participants by their readiness to project volunteer activities during the COVID-19 pan-

demic.

Readiness levels % of volunteers before the experiment % of volunteers after the experiment

Low 59.7 12.5

Sufﬁcient 37.5 76.4

High 2.8 11.1

2. Young people’s online training in projecting vol-

unteer activities during the pandemic is effective

if: 1) trainees and trainers know how to use infor-

mation and communication technologies for edu-

cational purposes; 2) there are good resources for

conducting effective online-classes; 3) the con-

tent of distance training is based on the scientiﬁc

principles of formation of volunteers’ readiness

for work under lockdown restrictions in order to

promote safety and mental and physical health of

people at risk;

3. The results of young people’s online volunteer

training can be helpful for: a) the development

of scientiﬁc ideas about the features of social

projects and training young people in project run-

ning under crisis circumstances; b) the improve-

ment of online education (in the context of youth

organization members’ training); c) forecasting

education policies in unfavorable social condi-

tions.

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Online Training of Youth Club Members of Ukraine in Projecting Volunteer Activities in the Conditions of the Spread of COVID-19