2023-07-27 06:48:21
Entitled “Technology in Education: A Tool on Whose Terms?”, the World Education Monitoring Report of 2023 is presented on July 26 at an event in Montevideo, Uruguay, organized by UNESCO, the Ministry of Education and Culture of Uruguay and the Ceibal Foundation with the participation of 18 education ministers from around the world. It proposes four questions that policy makers and stakeholders in education should reflect on as technology in education is deployed:Is it adequate?
The use of technology can enhance certain forms of learning in some contexts. The report cites evidence showing that the benefits of learning disappear if technology is used excessively or in the absence of a qualified teacher. For example, distributing computers to students does not improve learning if teachers do not participate in the pedagogical experience. Smartphones in schools have also been shown to be a distraction from learning, yet less than a quarter of countries ban their use in schools.
“We must learn from our past mistakes when using technology in education so as not to repeat them in the future,” says Manos Antoninis, Director of the Report. “We must teach children to live both with technology and without it; to take what they need from the abundance of information, but to ignore what is not necessary; to let technology support, but never supplant, human interactions in teaching and learning.”
Learning inequalities between students increase when teaching is exclusively remote and online content is not always appropriate for the context. A study of open educational resource collections revealed that almost 90% of online repositories for higher education were created in Europe or North America; 92% of the material in the Open Educational Resources Commons world library is published in English.
Is it fair?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the accelerated transition to online learning left out at least 500 million students around the world, hitting the poorest and those living in rural areas the most. The report underlines that the right to education is increasingly synonymous with the right to meaningful connectivity, and yet one in four primary schools lacks electricity. It calls for all countries to set benchmarks for connecting schools to the Internet by 2030 and to continue to focus on the most marginalized.
Is it expandable?
Reliable, rigorous and unbiased evidence on the added value of technology in learning is needed now more than ever, but it is not available. Most of the evidence comes from the United States, where the What Works Clearinghouse noted that less than 2% of educational interventions evaluated had “strong or moderate evidence of effectiveness.” When the evidence is only obtained from the technology companies themselves, there is a risk that it will be biased.
Many countries ignore the long-term costs of technology acquisitions and the market for EdTech it is expanding while basic education needs remain unmet. The cost of moving to basic digital learning in low-income countries and of connecting all schools to the Internet in lower-middle-income countries would add 50% to their current funding gap to meet national targets for the Education Goal. Sustainable Development 4. A full digital transformation of education with internet connectivity in schools and homes would cost more than $1 billion a day just to run.
Is it sustainable?
The dizzying pace of technology evolution forces education systems to adapt. Digital literacy and critical thinking are becoming increasingly important, especially given the growth of generative Artificial Intelligence. Additional data attached to the report indicates that this adaptation movement has already begun: 54% of the countries surveyed have defined the competencies they want to develop for the future. But only 11 of the 51 governments surveyed have AI curricula.
In addition to these competencies, basic literacy should not be overlooked as it is also critical for digital application: students with better reading skills are much less likely to be misled by emails from phishing.
In addition, teachers also need adequate training, although only half of the countries currently have standards to develop their ICT competencies. Few teacher training programs cover cybersecurity, despite the fact that 5% of cyber attacks ransomware are aimed at education.
Sustainability also requires a greater guarantee of the rights of technology users. Currently, only 16% of countries guarantee data privacy in education by law. According to an analysis, 89% of 163 educational technology products can poll children. In addition, 39 of the 42 governments that provided online education during the pandemic encouraged uses that “put at risk or violated” the rights of children.
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