Ruthy Salomon has been busier than ever since the Coronavirus pandemic first hit our shores. In the beginning, she was worried about how the situation would impact her business as many of her training sessions took place face-to-face. However, within a month, her online business had skyrocketed. Everyone was interested in improving their skills online whether teachers, lecturers, professors, doctoral students, or business professionals – and she was perfectly positioned to help them.
Ruthy has been in technology and education for the past 25 years. Her areas include innovation in education, technology in education, motivation, and anything else to do with learning.
“I’ve been providing training on EdTech Israel for many years, things like project-based learning, self-learning environments, future learning spaces, and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses),” Ruthy said. “This world has been my world for so long. I’ve always worked full-time, but I do the training sessions on a freelance basis.”
She was Head of Pedagogy (the method and practice of teaching) at the the Mofet Institute in Tel Aviv, a consortium of Israeli colleges of education which specializes in research, curriculum and program development for teacher educators, for nearly 11 years. She is now Head of Innovation at WebAcademix.
Ruthy Salomon training online
When the pandemic became a global issue, everything changed. Many organizations, universities, and others wanted to improve the methods that their educators, teachers, and lecturers used to teach online. The main goal was to become effective online in as short a time as possible.
Before COVID-19, most people didn’t teach online, so at the beginning of the pandemic, they had to learn how to use the technology, whether Zoom, Moodle (a learning management system that enables companies, schools, universities, and others to create their own online learning sites), or any other technology-based software.
“Once you’ve mastered the technology and it isn’t an issue anymore, that’s when the big questions start arising and you think to yourself, ‘So, I know how to use Zoom, how do I create an effective educational experience? What does it mean to be a teacher on Zoom and connect with the students emotionally, socially, and engage them and with them?’ And this is where I come in,” said Ruthy.
“It’s a different world. And that’s why people have been contacting me to help them with their training sessions. In these past eight or nine months, I’ve built a name for myself. I’ve built an additional technology-based business.”
Many departments at Bar-Ilan University, including the International School, have made use of Ruthy’s training sessions. The training at the International School was different from the teacher-training program. As the School’s main aim is recruiting and welcoming new students, the open days and other events all had to become virtual. They needed to be able to captivate the potential students and provide them with interesting and informative virtual open days and other events.
“Working with the International School was really great,” she said. “They’re all very sharp and very clever and I had to really stretch myself for them. It was a fantastic workshop.”
Ruthy Salomon getting ready to start a face-to-face training session
Currently, Ruthy teaches Information Science to first-year BA students (in Hebrew) at Bar-Ilan University. Her courses include open-source learning, UX, creating websites, user interface, user experience, and more.
“But this has nothing to do with the training I’ve been conducting over the past eight or nine months,” she said. “And it also has nothing to do with how I started the training at Bar-Ilan University.
“I was running a training session for teachers and teachers of teachers in Jerusalem and one of the delegates gave my name to Bar-Ilan. That’s how it all happened. Then I took it to different universities all over the country. They would call me and ask for a series of workshops and I would prepare a program for them. Each course is about five sessions of two academic hours (one-and-a-half hours) each,” Ruthy said.
Although Ruthy is originally from the UK, she has been in Israel for about 30 years. Most of her courses are in Hebrew at the moment, but she does have many people asking for courses in English.
At the beginning of September 2020, Bar-Ilan University ran a four-week English program with the European Union for international PhD students. Ruthy ran a workshop during the program, which was run by Prof. Liat Ayalon, Deputy Director of the Louis and Gabi Weisfeld School of Social Work and the Chair of the Supplementary Study Program for Master’s Degrees at the School.
The focus was for doctoral students because they often have to give presentations at conferences, and this program gave students practical advice on how to create a great presentation and how to be proficient and effective when giving a presentation online and face-to-face.
“Lecturers want to know how to create engagement in online learning, how to be an effective teacher online, how to get their students excited and keep them involved,” Ruthy said. “These are all the things you have to think about when you hold sessions that are either on Zoom or in Moodle.
“Students, however, want to know how to create a special presentation and that’s it. It’s very different.”
According to Ruthy, the workshop went really well. About 30 students from all over Europe and other continents participated.
“It was interesting to hear about their work and even more, to find out about the diversity of work and life during COVID-19 in different parts of the world,” she said.
“Now that the new year and new semester have started and I’m teaching my Information Science classes again, things have calmed down a bit, but the option for these training sessions will still continue throughout the year,” Ruthy concluded.
If you are interested in arranging a special training session for faculty, staff, or students in collaboration with Bar-Ilan University, please get in touch with Dafi Forer-Kremer, Director of Marketing and Recruitment at BIU’s International School.
If you need further information about Ruthy Salomon’s courses, you can email her here and mention you read about her in this article.
