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Each year, thousands of international visitors come to Estonia to see how its education system works. A new online Udemy course now brings that knowledge to them.
Here is something that happens regularly in Tallinn: a delegation of education officials arrives from abroad for a couple of days and a long list of questions. How are Estonian teachers trained? Why do the students perform so well in PISA? How did a country this small digitalise its schools before most of Europe? They meet experts, visit a school or two, and leave impressed, yet still see only a fraction of the picture.
Estonia’s education system draws far more international attention than a country of its size might expect. Last year alone, Education Estonia — an initiative of the Education and Youth Board — handled over 200 enquiries and delegations from 71 countries, and that is only a fraction of the total visits across ministries, institutions, and schools. The interest keeps growing. But there are only so many experts in a small country, and they get asked the same questions again and again.
The new course, “Understanding Estonia’s Education System” available on Udemy, was built to solve that problem. It gathers over 10 leading specialists, including ministry officials, university researchers, school leaders, and practising teachers. It lets each of them explain, on camera, the part of the system they know best. No single study visit could assemble this group in one room.
The view from the inside
The course is at its best when it goes beyond policy summaries and into lived experience. Mart Laanpere of Tallinn University tells the story of Estonia’s famous Tiger Leap programme, but not the version you find in reports. Laanpere has been part of this journey from the very beginning, first as an informatics teacher, then as a school principal, and later as a researcher. “We were in survival mode,” he recalls of the turbulent mid-1990s, when Estonia was still rebuilding itself as an independent state. “I was paying more for heating my school in winter than for all my teachers’ salaries.” It is a detail that makes the decision to invest in computers and the internet for every school look far bolder than the usual telling suggests.
That kind of first-hand perspective is what holds the Udemy course together, and the people explaining the system are the same ones who built it and run it today. Specialists are explaining how teacher education works, how the curriculum is designed, what PISA results actually reveal, and what the role of an educational technologist, a position found in almost every Estonian school, looks like day to day. Alongside the expert interviews, the course includes video material from schools that shows how the system works in practice rather than just in theory.
A course that grows with the system
The Udemy course is updated as the system evolves. The most recent addition covers Estonia’s AI Leap — the country’s new national initiative for artificial intelligence in education, and a fitting next chapter in a story that started with Tiger Leap in 1996. As Laanpere puts it in the course, the initial vision could not have foreseen how far Estonia has come. Almost three decades later, the question is no longer whether to use technology in schools, but how AI will reshape what teaching and learning mean.
Who the Udemy course is for
With 30 concise videos totalling around 1.5 hours, plus additional resources, the course focuses on general education. It serves policymakers, school leaders, researchers, international partners, and anyone with a genuine curiosity about how education systems work. For those planning a visit, it sharpens and makes conversations on the ground more productive from the start.
The course is available on Udemy, a global learning platform, at a modest fee.
