Tag: Covid19

Mountain village

Planning ahead: Broadband and education in the mountains beyond Covid19

By Martin Price, Director of the Centre for Mountain Studies, Perth College, University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland – with thanks to Euromontana for some of the links!

During the current Covid19 crisis, we have become ever more dependent on the quality of our broadband connections, for many aspects of our lives.  All our meetings are now online (I have now used six different platforms!), those of us with children have had to become part-time home teachers (while trying to work full-time…) using online materials provided by their childrens’ schools (and, in the UK, the BBC) and universities have had to rapidly shift their delivery online. For some universities, this is not just a short-term measure: for example, Cambridge University has announced that all lectures will be online until the end of the next academic year.

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In the meanwhile, in the mountains: new opportunities on the horizon

By Jorge Gimeno Pawlowski, member of the board of Center for Innovative Education (CIE) and advisor for EU affairs.

Writing this article has been an exercise in responsibility, creativity and numerous debates within the Center for Innovative Education (CIE). Having the honour of being the second to write after Tor Arnesen, our partner in NEMOR and author of the great article that precedes this one, is not an easy task. In fact, we had a similar idea of writing about the mountains of opportunities springing from the coronavirus crisis we are experiencing.

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In the meanwhile, in Norway: the coronavirus crisis puts emergency preparedness in rural mountain municipalities on the agenda

By Tor Arnesen, researcher at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences.

About half of the Norwegians has access to a second home and many people divide their time and lives between an apartment in the city and their cabin in rural mountain areas. When the Covid 2019-crisis hit in March 2020, the Norwegian government instructed, by emergency law, second home households to leave the mountains and return to the cities. The reason: the emergency preparedness in the rural mountain municipalities hosting second homes, is not capable of dealing with as many people as they de facto have in their community when second home households are counted in. (more…)