On April 22, 2021, Metropolitan University Prague in cooperation with Edhance Plus, o.p.s. organized the scientific workshop dedicated to assessment of existing media literacy policies in Central Europe. The workshop was entitled “Media literacy in Germany, Czech Republic in Slovakia” and took place online (MS Teams platform) due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Media literacy experts from each country were invited as well as other interested parts. The workshop was open to public with no registration needed.

The anchorperson of the workshop, prof. Jan Jirák from MUP, welcomed all the participants and shortly introduced the whole MELIA Observatory project. He also presented the timetable of the workshop and invited participants to take an active part in the discussion, than the speaker Katharina Mosene, Liebniz Institute for Media Research/Hans-Bredow Institute was talking about current position of media literacy in Germany. She pointed out that while in national strategies and curriculums is present strong impact on the topic of media literacy, the factual situation is full of problems such as: the undeveloped network systems at schools and undertrained teachers, who are not able to work with digital technologies, weak national support.

The next guest was Mr. Norbert Vrabec, University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava that pointed out that the topic is present (mainly in the form of digital literacy) in national strategies, but its implementation is slow and lies on the shoulders of various NGO`s. According to his research, one of the main problems of media literacy implementation in Slovakia is lack of teachers able to teach ML because there is no possibility to study media literacy as teaching specialization on Slovak universities.

Kateřina Křivánková from Markéta Supa, Charles University in Prague offered kind of a different viewpoint, because she represented one of the NGO`s dedicated to media literacy in Czech Republic. She mainly described the outputs of their work and current projects which are currently going on. She also presented some quantitative data about the level of media education of young people.

Jan Jirák closed the workshop concluding that there are many similarities between the media literacy assessment in the Central European countries. Each country has some state policy of medial literacy, but unfortunately all counties have many problems with its implementation.