Digital learning futures
Around the world, there are promising examples of technology enlarging access to knowledge and information, enriching educational processes, and improving learning outcomes.
However, there are also warning signs that the digital transformation of education carries underappreciated challenges. Teachers, students, and policy makers have witnessed the many ways that technology can heighten learning inequality; increase student isolation; narrow and privatize educational experiences; homogenize teaching and learning; undermine the professional autonomy of teachers; produce harmful environmental impacts; violate privacy and trust; and consolidate power and control outside public oversight.
UNESCO conducts research and foresight help countries navigate the educational risks and opportunities presented by technology in an era of accelerating digital change.
In this new context, connected technology must advance aspirations for inclusive education that facilitates sustainable development based on principles of social and economic justice, equity, and respect for human rights.
Around the world, there are promising examples of technology enlarging access to knowledge and information, enriching educational processes, and improving learning outcomes. But these examples are not common enough.
Increasingly, there are warning signs that the digital transformation of education carries underappreciated challenges. Teachers, students, and policy makers have witnessed the many ways that technology can heighten learning inequality; increase student isolation; narrow and privatize educational experiences; homogenize teaching and learning; undermine the professional autonomy of teachers; produce harmful environmental impacts; violate privacy and trust; and consolidate power and control outside public oversight.
鈥淐onnected technologies are rapidly altering the 鈥榳here鈥, 鈥榳hen鈥, 鈥榳ho鈥, 鈥榳hat鈥, 鈥榟ow鈥, and 鈥榳hy鈥 of learning. But the educational changes accompanying the integration of new technology, far from being inevitable or outside our control, can be steered with focused policies, actions, regulations, and incentives.鈥
Gateways to Public Digital Learning
鈥楪ateways鈥 is a global initiative jointly run by UNESCO and UNICEF to help countries establish and improve public digital learning platforms. It facilitates cross-border cooperation to ensure that all students, teachers and families have access to high-quality, well-organized and curriculum-aligned digital education content.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy?
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the numerous adverse and unintended consequences of the shift to ed-tech. It documents how technology-first solutions left a global majority of learners behind and details the many ways education was diminished even when technology was available and worked as intended.
