UKE's Education and Information Campaigns Unit with the international WSIS Prizes 2023 Champion award!

UKE's Education and Information Campaigns Unit with the international WSIS Prizes 2023 Champion award!

15 March 2023 is especially important for us, it was on this year's World Consumer Day that we received the award won in the prestigious international competition WSIS Prizes 2023 Champion!

Our initiative #keepCTRL – youth safe online! ranked among the top in the e-learning category.

A few words about WSIS Prizes

The World Summit on the Information Society Prizes (WSIS Prizes) competition was launched by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in response to requests from stakeholders of the World Forum on the Information Society to create a mechanism for evaluating projects and activities that harness the power of information and communication technologies to promote sustainable development. From the very beginning, the contest has attracted more than 300,000 stakeholders. WSIS Prizes is a unique global platform for identifying and showcasing success stories in the implementation of WSIS's sustainability action lines and goals.

#keepCTRL – youth safe online!

One of UKE's priorities is to educate young users about the responsible use of services and preventive measures to protect them from dangerous phenomena. The main goal of our activities is to improve digital competence. With young people in mind, we conducted a series of Children’s Day webinars in 2022, targeting students in grades VI–VIII of primary schools, covering topics such as hate and hate speech, sexting, fake news and misinformation, and phishing. The webinar series initiative has been submitted to the WSIS Prizes 2023 competition.

The online classes conducted were a response to changes emerging in cyberspace: the systematic increase in the number of service users and, at the same time, the development of negative phenomena such as phishing, hate, hate speech, fake news and misinformation or sexting. In the webinars, we stressed the importance of protecting privacy, taking care of published data, or being cautious about “sharing” private information on websites and social media.

Online educational classes allow us to reach a much larger audience than traditional on-site workshops conducted at school facilities. The ability to connect in a virtual formula is an additional advantage that shows the possibilities that the use of e-services opens up to everyone, regardless of age or gender. In addition, the meetings conducted help users with low digital competence to find their way in the new realities of today’s world, and to recognise the pattern of online scams such as phishing or fake news, know how to react to events occurring online and protect themselves from various attacks. This is an undoubted advantage and it enhances the quality of education through the use of interactive elements and promoting the use of digital assets in the acquisition and development of future competencies.

Webinars were very popular, with a total of 14302 participants in the events!

Once again, thank you for each and every vote you cast, which contributed to being recognised in such a prestigious competition!