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Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, held a three-day training conference at the agency’s headquarters in Warsaw this week to discuss educational technology for border and coast guard training.

During the event, member states, partner countries, international and European organisations, as well as experts came together to discuss how e-training can facilitate the education of border and coast guard officers across the EU.

Frontex presented its recent developments and achievements in the area of training. Last year, the agency’s experts trained more than 1200 officers in fields such as border surveillance at land and sea, training for return specialists, nationality screening and detection of falsified documents. The agency also presented planned training activities for 2018.

Educational technology is an effective way to facilitate training in a community of tens of thousands of border and coast guard officers. Instant access to training resources, flexible learning time, libraries of digital content, the use of artificial intelligence and virtual reality create opportunities to share knowledge and best practices through online collaboration platforms. In this way officers can quickly and efficiently acquire the knowledge needed to be deployed in operations along EU’s border.

One of the key tasks of Frontex is to develop training curricula for border guards across the EU to help harmonise border control in all member states. With its new mandate, the agency can now quickly deploy hundreds of officers to help member states secure the external EU border, at land, air or sea. However, the deployment of large number of officers over a short period of time requires a new approach to training using e-learning technology. Frontex aims at ensuring that all staff has the same necessary knowledge and practical skills to support member states at their external borders.