Training and Education during the Pandemic Crisis

The H2020 ANITA project experience

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is deeply redesigning the approach and practices in the field of training targeting law
enforcement agencies (LEAs). The effects are interesting and multifaceted and are expected to persist on the
medium and long term. In fact, a new room for debating on positive and negative experiences, advantages and
difficulties, emerging needs and requirements, pioneering ideas and ground-breaking initiatives has opened. The H2020 ANITA project wants to contribute to this debate by providing details about how it has managed to reorganise its training activities from in-person to remote sessions, the perception and feedback from the participating LEAs and the criteria it is using to design curricula for public and private stakeholders on online illegal trafficking.
It is emerging that digitalised and remote trainings addressed to law enforcement agencies require both a new
and innovative didactic concept and a ground-breaking learning paradigm. In-person lessons are essential for
their wide-ranging benefits, but the COVID-19 pandemic is showing how distance learning could be also revolutionary and powerful. However, the equilibrium among the three main components represented by educating, discussing and exchanging should be established. In this framework, the hypothesis on if and how innovative knowledge-based and user-centred technologies – like the ANITA platform, which is investigation-based – could be used also to further build capacities, training and curricula for LEAs is explored. These tools are likely to have a great potential for generating contents to be used for multi-stakeholders training and capacity building, mutual understanding and exchange of information and practices.