by Zohra Yermeche, Program Director for Connect To Learn at Ericsson
The COVID-19 crisis, and the impact which it has had on learning across the world, has highlighted many of the digital disparities which exist in today’s world. At a time when many of the world’s students shifted from physical to digital, we were also faced with the hard truth that today there are still 3.6 billion people in the world who are unconnected.
For students in the connected
half of the world, the story is much different. While 1.2 billion children were
affected by school closures across much of the world, our recent Consumer
COVID-19 report found that students were able
to substitute physical learning by spending 230 percent more time on digital
learning tools such as Google Class, Epic! and Seesaw Class.
This of course is a
significant rise, but it is also an acceleration of a trend which we have
steadily been tracking since our first Connect To
Learn program exactly ten years ago.
The State of
Broadband 2020 report estimates that there
are twice as many people today who use the Internet compared to 2010. This rise
in digital literacy, together with the imminent period of rapid digitalization
of the economy, means that ensuring fair and equal access to both education and
future job markets will rest 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 bigger role in the quality and scope of how we learn, such as new digital
learning platforms which are estimated to reach 350 billion
USD by 2025; what we learn, with a growing
emphasis on programming, robotics, AI and automation; and how we can use it in
the job market, with digital skillsets increasingly becoming a prerequisite of
tomorrow’s workforce.
The changes which are
happening today show the disparity between the developed and undeveloped world.
If you are not connected, that shows you the leap which you have to make
between the connectivity aspect, access to education and benefits which are
derived from that.
Closing this digital divide,
with those who are not connected or not considered to be digitally literate, is
imperative to ensuring a fair distribution of digital opportunities across
countries, locations, gender, socioeconomic status, and age.
Access to education in the
digital age
In 2010, we co-founded
the Connect To
Learn initiative with the Earth Institute at
Columbia University and Millennium Promise, with a focus on delivering
connectivity and ICT tools to enhance teaching and learning in unconnected,
underprivileged and largely unrepresented communities.
Since our first projects in the Millennium Villages, we’ve helped to connect and increase the digital inclusion of more than 200,000 students worldwide. As the program has evolved, we have increased our efforts to close the digital divide not just in terms of connectivity, but from a content, syllabus and platform side which is fundamental.
As a technology company, we
quickly discovered that we can offer so much more than connectivity, but
furthermore can help improve learning processes and methodologies so learning
can become more impactful. For example, through partnerships with like-minded
organizations, we have helped to digitalize 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, both as a medium and a means to enter the job market was
still relatively immature as the landscape has evolved, we’ve come to
understand the need to personalize and individualize learning so that we can
improve learning outcomes in a meaningful way.
Giving people access to the
right type of content is one aspect, another equally critical aspect is the
human element. On top of the digital layer, students will still always need the
engagement, inspiration and activation that comes from teachers and trainers
who know about the topic. I believe that, even in the digital age, technology
will never be able to replace this interaction, but rather can serve as an
increasingly innovative medium for those critical learner-instructor interactions,
such as through the Internet of
Skills.
Digital inclusion
through public-private partnerships
Today, there is a significant
need for digital skills courses. Key technology areas such as AI, robotics and
app development are advancing at such a rapid pace, which can make it difficult
to ensure an effective transfer of competence to emerging workforces.
Such is the pace of change
for topics such as these, public academic institutions will invariably struggle
to take learning beyond a basic theoretical level. Public-private partnerships
will therefore be key to addressing this, by developing advanced curriculums
and delivering the necessary quality and scale of access.
As a sustainability pioneer
in the private sector, we’ve understood the power of partnership, which is why
we’re investing heavily in building out those partnerships with like-minded
entities to create sustainable solutions in order to address the issues which
the education sector faces today. A good example of this is the Ericsson Digital
Lab program which is now live in several
countries in partnership with local schools and community learning centers. The
aim here is to share those competences that we have in-house on a much broader
scale, addressing those critical skillset demands which are needed in
tomorrow’s workforce.
This year, in response to the
impact which COVID-19 has had on learning, we continuing these efforts by
joining the UNESCO-led Global Education Coalition, 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 improving digital skills for students across
all communities, our commitment is to ensure that future generations continue
to have the skills and knowledge to find opportunity in a changing digital
world. This was what we set out to do when we launched Connect To Learn ten
years ago, and this will continue to be our priority in this next critical
decade of action.
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