Authored by Zoya Lytvyn, Founder of NGO Osvitoria and Novopecherska School in Kyiv.

How can digital learning strengthen education during times of crisis? Ukraine's national online school demonstrates how a rapidly deployed digital solution evolved into critical education infrastructure, ensuring learning continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's full-scale invasion while offering lessons for resilient, future-ready education systems.

In Ukraine, digital education is not about convenience or trends. It has become part of the country’s survival infrastructure. While much of the world is going digital to make education smarter and more efficient, Ukraine is doing it to keep schools running through war.

Russia’s full-scale invasion has disrupted in-person learning and displaced millions. Consequently, Ukrainian school education has become the most digitalised in the world — out of necessity, not by choice, as Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, has put it.

Today, more than 300,000 learners in Ukraine and over one million Ukrainian children abroad rely on GovTech solutions to continue their education. Ukraine has responded by building a multi-layered, crisis-resilient system that brings together national platforms, offline tools and integrated digital ecosystems. It also carries a broader lesson for governments worldwide: when crisis hits, education must be able to move fast, work under pressure and reach learners wherever they are.

Built for a Pandemic, Tested by War: Ukraine’s First National Digital Platform

Ukraine’s digital education system was born out of a crisis. When the COVID-19 pandemic closed classrooms, the government moved quickly to broadcast school lessons on national television. It kept learning going, but TV could only serve as a temporary bridge. A scalable solution followed: the All-Ukrainian Online School, Ukraine’s first national platform for blended and distance learning.

Launched as an emergency response in partnership with the NGO Osvitoria and administered by the state, the platform soon became part of everyday school life — supporting children who miss classes, enabling flipped learning and giving teachers tools to organise instruction online.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, it took on a far more critical role. Due to the imminent threat to life, every third Ukrainian child has been forced to leave their home and school. On top of that, there are over 6,000 students accessing Ukraine’s education from temporarily occupied territories — often at a great personal risk. For them, this platform has been a national lifeline.

Overall, the platform—available on the web and through iOS and Android apps with access that does not count towards users’ allocated cellular plan data—now has over 1.1 million users from over 120 countries. Students in grades 1–11 can study 23 core subjects through video lessons, tests and assignments aligned with the national curriculum. Teachers can create virtual classrooms and courses, assign tasks and track progress.

An App that Works Offline for Ukraine’s Youngest Students

Launched in September 2022, Can’t Wait to Learn was developed by War Child in partnership with Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science and the NGO Osvitoria. Designed for children in grades 1-4, the mobile app turns mathematics and reading into a gamified learning experience.

Its defining feature is that it works fully offline. Once downloaded, the app requires neither an internet connection nor mobile data, allowing children to keep learning in bomb shelters and during prolonged blackouts.

That capability has only grown more important as Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have continued through the winter of 2025-2026. In a country where air raids and power cuts can interrupt the school day without warning, offline-capable digital learning tools are not an extra feature — they keep education accessible.

Beyond a Learning Platform: Mriia as a Digital Ecosystem

As the war continued, Ukraine’s digital education needed to outgrow any single platform. Schools needed one system that could connect students, parents and teachers while supporting both learning and the everyday running of school life.

Presented in September 2023, Mriia is a state-owned digital education ecosystem developed jointly by Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation and Ministry of Education and Science. It brings schedules, homework, and interactive materials into one place, so a school no longer runs on scattered paper records and messenger groups. Parents see their child's academic progress and attendance as they happen, rather than waiting for a parent-teacher meeting to find out how things are going.

Students can also discover extracurricular activities suited to their own interests, and explore a personalised library of educational content alongside their coursework. For teachers, digital journals, automated test generation, and integrated communication tools cut down the routine administrative work that otherwise eats into time better spent with students.

Now used by one in three schools across Ukraine, Mriia continues to expand its reach and functionality. A dedicated preschool solution, Mriia Preschool, is currently being piloted to simplify educators’ daily planning, reduce administrative workload, and strengthen communication with families.

The team is also testing AI-powered tools, including automated test generation for teachers and a daily planning assistant for preschool educators – this will help create clearer learning pathways and support people throughout their lifelong learning journey.

From World’s Best Practice to Wartime Necessity

Ukraine did not build its digital education model in isolation. Before developing its own GovTech solutions, it studied the experience of Finland and Estonia — two countries with some of Europe’s most advanced digital education systems. Estonian examples included ALPA Kids, an early-learning platform with localised educational games, and e-Koolikott, a national digital library. Finnish tools such as Seppo demonstrated the potential of gamified learning, while TinyApp helped early-years teachers plan, document and share children’s progress with families.

The difference was the pressure under which these ideas had to work. In Finland and Estonia, digital tools generally complement classroom teaching. In Ukraine, they may be the only way to continue learning during displacement, occupation, air raids or prolonged school closures. What might otherwise have taken years of gradual reform was compressed into months. The war did not stop digitalisation — it accelerated it.

Ukraine’s experience also challenges the assumption that digitalisation makes public systems more fragile. When designed to function under pressure, digital infrastructure can make essential services more resilient. By rapidly restoring access to learning during a full-scale war, Ukraine showed that education systems can adapt even under extreme disruption.

Technology alone, however, did not drive this transformation. Ukrainian teachers actively searched for new tools, retrained at speed and developed ways to support students facing learning gaps, displacement, trauma and transitions between different school systems. This demand helped create an entire ecosystem of digital professional learning for educators — from online courses and practical resources to peer communities and knowledge-sharing networks. Teachers were not simply users of the new system; they became one of its main driving forces.

What Comes Next for Ukraine’s Digital Education

Ukraine’s next challenge is no longer simply to put education online, but to make digital systems more responsive to the needs of students, teachers and schools.

Looking ahead, Mriia plans to develop its AI capabilities around an educational graph — a connected system that maps relationships among topics, skills, and learning activities.

Diia.Education, Ukrainian government’s edutainment platform for citizens’ digital literacy upskill, has already introduced an AI Mentor and AI Navigator. Embedded in educational series and simulators, they explain complex professional terms and help users build personalised learning pathways across more than 700 educational products.

Mriia is preparing to pilot a nationwide gamification system designed to strengthen student motivation and make learning more engaging. Students will be able to earn an in-app currency for their progress and learning activities, then exchange it for rewards such as cinema tickets, VR experiences, workshops, courses, tutoring sessions, and certificates for books or toys.

The platform is also rolling out an AI test generator supported by the WINWIN EdTech Center of Excellence. The system draws on more than 1,300 state-approved textbooks across 30 subjects, together with the Ministry of Education’s methodological guidelines. Questions generated by one AI model are checked by a second system before reaching students.

Teachers retain full editorial control: they can revise or replace generated questions, while the system can analyse student responses and suggest grades for final approval. Built-in anti-cheating tools prevent copying and screenshots during assessments. The aim is not to automate teaching, but to reduce routine work and give educators more time to work directly with students.

Ukraine is also studying how AI is already being used in schools, which has already become effectively ubiquitous — per 2026 stats. A national project led by the Ministry of Digital Transformation in partnership with OpenAI will survey 7,000 teenagers, parents and teachers. The findings will feed into a public dashboard, future government policy and an AI Safety Toolkit for young people.

What Ukraine’s Experience Shows

Ukraine’s experience shows that digital education is not simply a collection of platforms and apps. In a prolonged crisis, it becomes public infrastructure — one that must keep learning accessible when classrooms close, families are displaced, and electricity or connectivity fails.

A crisis-resilient education system needs several core components:

• Universal access to the national curriculum. Learners must be able to continue their education regardless of where they are or whether they can attend school in person.
• Trusted tools for foundational learning. Younger students need verified, age-appropriate resources for literacy and numeracy, especially when displacement or prolonged school closures disrupt their early education.
• A unified digital ecosystem. Students, teachers, parents, schools and government institutions need secure systems that bring learning, communication, progress tracking and educational records together rather than scattering them across disconnected services.
• Offline and blackout resilience. Essential content must remain available when internet access is unstable, mobile data is limited or power is unavailable.
• Continuous learning for educators and adults. Teachers need practical tools, training and professional communities to adapt their methods, while adults affected by displacement and economic change need accessible opportunities to update or rebuild their skills.

Together, these components turn digital technology from an optional addition into a system capable of adapting under pressure. Ukraine’s model is not a universal formula, but it shows what modern education must be prepared to do: move quickly, remain accessible and continue when normal conditions no longer exist.

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