What does equal access to education mean in the digital age?

Opinions on Saturday, December 12, 2020

Columnist: Zohra Yermeche

2020-12-12

The COVID-19 crisis and the impact it has had on learning around the world has highlighted many of the digital disparities that exist in today’s world. At a time when many of the world’s students went from physical to digital, we are also faced with the harsh truth that there are still 3.6 billion people in the world today who are not connected.

For students in the connected half of the world, the story is very different. While 1.2 billion children were affected by school closings in much of the world, our recent Consumer COVID-19 report found that students were able to replace physical learning by spending 230% more time on digital learning tools like Google Class, Epic! and seesaw class.

This is of course a significant increase, but it is also an acceleration of a trend that we have been consistently following since our first Connect To Learn program exactly ten years ago.

The 2020 State of Broadband report estimates that there are twice as many people using the Internet today compared to 2010. This rise in digital literacy, coupled with the impending period of rapid digitization of the economy, means that ensuring fair and equal access to both Education and future labor markets will depend on the extent of digital inclusion within our societies.

What is digital inclusion and why is it so important today?

Today, technology plays a much larger role in the quality and scope of how we learn, such as new digital learning platforms estimated to reach $ 350 billion by 2025; what we learn, with an increasing emphasis on programming, robotics, AI and automation; and how we can use it in the job market, where digital skill sets are increasingly becoming a prerequisite for tomorrow’s workforce.

The changes taking place today show the disparity between the developed and the undeveloped world. If you are not connected, that shows you the leap you have to make between the aspect of connectivity, access to education and the benefits that come from it.

Closing this digital divide, with those who are not connected or do not consider themselves digitally literate, is imperative to ensure a fair distribution of digital opportunities between countries, locations, gender, socioeconomic status and age.

Impact of digital inclusion on GDP and the labor market

Ten years ago, geopolitical discussions were largely focused on skills development for teachers, and digital policy was given little priority beyond essential connectivity requirements.

Today, the policy landscape is starting to look very different and the rise of the digital economy is driving this change. For example, when we look at digital inclusion in the context of the labor market, the 5G digital economy alone is projected to create 22.3 million jobs worldwide in the next decade. This also has repercussions on GDP, as having a workforce that is not digitally trained is of course not compatible with a digitized economy.

As such, we already see today how governments are prioritizing digital inclusion on their political agendas, especially at this year’s G20 summit. There seems to be more emphasis and regulation to support digital education and the impact it has on an awakening of the rest of the economy.

While the first priority of governments in digitizing their societies is setting up the tools, providing connectivity to enable the digital services of tomorrow, it is also important that people know how to use them and how to use them responsibly. Digital literacy and capacity building are some of the key elements that governments and private companies should continue to work on in the years to come. These efforts must be well coordinated, scaled up and based on evidence-based policy formulation, as set out in the United Nations Roadmap for Digital Cooperation (page 8).

Access to education in the digital age

In 2010, we co-founded the Connect To Learn initiative with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the Millennium Promise, with a focus on providing connectivity and ICT tools to improve teaching and learning in disconnected, disadvantaged, and largely unrepresented communities.

Since our first projects at Millennium Villages, we have helped connect and increase the digital inclusion of more than 200,000 students around the world. As the program has evolved, we have increased our efforts to bridge the digital divide not only in terms of connectivity, but also from a content, curriculum and platform standpoint, which is critical.

As a technology company, we quickly discovered that we can offer much more than connectivity, but we can also help improve learning processes and methodologies to make learning more impactful. For example, through partnerships with like-minded organizations, we have helped digitize and disseminate content through digital learning tools such as mobile apps.

One of the biggest differences from ten years ago is also that the nature of technology in an educational context, as a means and as a means to enter the labor market, was still relatively immature as the landscape has evolved, we have come to understand the We need to personalize and individualize learning so that we can improve learning outcomes in a meaningful way.

Giving people access to the right kind of content is one aspect, another equally critical aspect is the human element. In addition to the digital layer, students will always need the commitment, inspiration, and activation that comes from knowledgeable teachers and trainers. I believe that even in the digital age, technology can never replace this interaction, but can serve as an increasingly innovative medium for those critical interactions between student and instructor, such as through the Internet of Skills.

Digital inclusion through public-private partnerships

Today, there is a great need for digital skills courses. Key technology areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and application development are advancing at such a rapid pace, which can make it difficult to ensure effective transfer of skills to emerging workforces.

Such is the pace of change for topics like these, public academic institutions will invariably struggle to take learning beyond the basic theoretical level. Therefore, public-private partnerships will be key to addressing this, by developing advanced curricula and delivering the necessary quality and scale of access.

As sustainability pioneers in the private sector, we have understood the power of partnership, which is why we are investing heavily in building those partnerships with like-minded entities to create sustainable solutions in order to address the problems that the education sector faces. today.

A good example of this is the Ericsson Digital Lab program, which is now available in several countries in partnership with local schools and community learning centers. The goal here is to share those competencies we have internally on a much broader scale, addressing the critical skill demands that are needed in tomorrow’s workforce.

This year, in response to the impact that COVID-19 has had on learning, we are continuing these efforts by joining the UNESCO-led Global Coalition for Education, launching Ericsson Educate, and partnering with UNICEF to map school connectivity as part of the Giga project.

Through digital methodologies, and with a focus on enhancing students’ digital skills in all communities, our commitment is to ensure that future generations continue to have the skills and knowledge to find opportunities in a changing digital world. This is what we set out to do when we launched Connect To Learn ten years ago, and it will continue to be our priority in this critical next decade of action.