An initial outline for a project of building a virtual educational environment for children all over the world, which was presented before Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO in a meeting held on February 2nd, 2011

Goal of the Project
The goal of the project is to provide a virtual educational environment for children all over the world where children gain awareness of the integral world they live in and recognize the need to live by the laws of the new world. By the end of the first year, we anticipate having up to 100,000 children worldwide of various nationalities and religions who have come to recognize the importance of realizing the core values, as will be agreed upon by UNESCO and the Ashlag Research Institute (ARI).

The Means
The means to achieve the goal is by creating an online environment that facilitates an evolutionary educational process.

We will build an environment in which children will undergo an evolutionary process turning them into tolerant, responsible and considerate human beings who understand the opportunities and responsibilities of being a citizen of the world.

The environment will enable children to partake in various activities with other children throughout the world, which will help them to feel their interconnectivity with friends they will make all over the planet.

They will understand and learn through components/activities that will be part of the site that they have an opportunity to improve humanity through their actions and intentions. We believe that the exposure to this environment will change the children, turning them into “global, integral adults,” as they gradually learn to live the core values of UNESCO and the ARI.

Methodology and Monitoring
The language, perception, principles, and values are those that have been portrayed herein. However, they must be conveyed through activities, games, and other means. At the moment, what is needed is to translate the ideas into actions and the messages into educational aides which the children are familiar with.

Certain indexes must be established to measure the success of the process, and the development of the educational process will be accompanied by constant monitoring of quality and methodology.

Alongside the educational and methodological monitoring, we will set up control and tracking systems that will constantly monitor the progress of the project in terms of participation on a country by country basis, reaching the goals and targets that were determined in advance, as well as meeting the intended timetables.

Control Group — the Proof
From the onset of the program, we will be able to track the impact of the environment and the success of the method through a control group that will include children who match the age groups defined as target audiences. Parents and educators will also assist. In addition, we will make the results available to interested educators who would be willing to participate and publish studies based upon our work.

In Stage One, the control group will consist of children from around the world who speak
English, Spanish, and Russian, and who have different mentalities and religious, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds.

As a side note, interactive online study programs have been a growing trend in recent years, but most of them are incomplete or insufficiently comprehensive, and hence do not address all of the issues with which we would like to work.

Review of Similar Sites
Out of all the educational Internet sites that the ARI team examined, none attempted to connect the participants to one another. In other words, the work there is individual and takes place one-on-one with the computer.

Most sites do not address social issues at all, nor do they engage in teaching values.
In conjunction with the program, as part of the second stage, we will develop a “life skills” study program for use by educators and educational institutions around the world.
The target audiences primarily fall into three categories: children, parents, and teachers.

Children
Ages 8-12 and 12-15

We have selected these age groups for several reasons:

• We wish to show that the method affects children and changes them for the better regardless of age. Hence, we have chosen two different age groups.
• Since we wish to demonstrate a fundamental change, we have chosen the age groups that make possible to see the changes clearly, leaving no doubt that the changes occurred. These ages, considered especially difficult, make it easier to demonstrate the significant changes.
• At earlier ages, such as 6-8, the problems are less acute. At those ages the children are just beginning the process of being absorbed into school, at which time there is still no genuine difficulty. Their primary effort is to adapt to the school environment which they are encountering for the first time.
• Although children today start using the Internet very early in life, the problematic side of this is much more acute in the age groups we have chosen. One of the goals we have set is for children to be exposed to the program through the Internet use, and to utilize this tool responsibly as a means to circulate the message of unity and mutual consideration, the values required of us by the global world.

Parents
At this age, children have to be approached through parents. Therefore, parents must be fully involved and participate in the process together with the children.
We believe without gaining the acceptance of parents it will be challenging to achieve the mutual goal.

Educators
Educators are an important target audience for preparing the ground to introduce the method to other parties who will wish to adopt the method or parts of it in the future.
There are many sites offering teaching methods and extracurriculars to children. Our unique
asset will lie in maintaining the following “values to means to knowledge”, and maximizing the use of all the means at our disposal: The Values, The Means, The Knowledge.