UNESCO, UNICEF and ECLAC warn that at current rates, Latin America and the Caribbean will not meet the education targets set by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that integrate three dimensions: economic, social and environmental, with education occupying a central place as stated in SDG 4: “Ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all people.
In this context, the role of digital technologies in enhancing and improving the impact of education change programs is becoming increasingly important.
In order to achieve real change, it is necessary to promote projects that can be scaled quickly. Today, the proposition of true use of technology tools – used in an effective, responsible and planned manner – is critical to achieving this.
This is why scaling in educational programs cannot depend on a single actor, but rather requires a systematic approach to avoid isolated actions of different actors playing part of the educational system.
Clearly this must be accompanied by the need to “put egos aside” and think in a collaborative and generous way. Consequently, in order to achieve a sustainable and successful model, mutual cooperation between all relevant educational actors is required, for which the strategy outlines ten important actions:
Expand access: Online access to resources programs can be designed to allow educational initiatives to reach larger numbers of students, including those living in rural or hard-to-reach areas.
For example, online learning platforms can offer courses and educational materials to students around the world. There are and many of them are public and free.
Optimizing costs and operations: Digital technologies can help reduce the costs of implementing educational initiatives. For example, you may choose to use solutions that automate administrative tasks, academic management, or organizational communications.
Enhancing learning: Digital technologies can help improve the quality of learning by providing students with a personalized experience tailored to their needs. For example, adaptive learning tools can help students improve their skills by providing content and activities tailored to their level.
Creating and distributing educational materials: Online learning platforms, educational applications, and augmented and virtual reality tools can help create and distribute educational materials in an efficient and scalable manner.
In this way, it is possible to feed a platform of open digital resources for each educator to reuse and adapt. MOOCs have also been run in other parts of the world, which can be consulted and in this way also create international communities of practice.
Training for Managers/Teachers/Assistants/Supervisors: Online learning platforms, assessment tools, management tools to optimize their time, teaching practices and streaming tools to express them through social networks help provide support to teachers, which can improve your ability to implement educational interventions.
With the training session planned according to the digital agenda of this place, always focus on how to improve the teaching proposal, institutional or sub-programme.
Evidence for Decision Making: There are more and more solutions that allow real-time collection of computer information at the classroom level and in the holistic setting.
Whether it’s administrative or academic information or learning assessment, technology is critical to improving processes for evaluating learning and educational programs, and designing timely action plans to address real problems and realignment on track.
Create multi-level learning communities: One of the most interesting potentials of the use of digital environments is the creation of collaborative workplaces that allow for improved communication and exchange at all management levels.
In this way, effective applications and good practices are democratized both in the design and management of educational policies and teaching methods. I always think that there are others who can improve my way of working.
Open innovation: The same set of codes of practice does not work in all countries, territories and populations. The key is that technology allows us to create “open source” knowledge that gives policymakers around the world the opportunity to find new answers to problems facing education systems.
Flexibility: Artificial intelligence today is capable of identifying a user’s gaming profile and making recommendations to improve their performance. Can we think of technologies that allow us to better understand how our students learn without waiting for standardized test results? International or National?
The challenge today is to understand how technological progress provides new dynamics to achieve the goal of improving learning and bringing it closer to our everyday reality.
New leadership: Open spaces allow us to discover the profiles of new leaders and references that underpin, from their role, support processes of policy appropriation by the various actors involved in the process.
Although the entire region of Latin America and the Caribbean is similar in most aspects of their education systems, each country has its own reality and requires analysis, planning and adaptation to its own present.
Sharing experiences between leaders and promoters allows them to learn from each other’s successes and mistakes. We need to create a community of practice and learning that uses technology to create educational programs that positively impact society and allow Latin America to stop being a highly unequal region and become a leader in education and talent development.
Natalia Jasin is the CEO and Founder of Bounty EdTech
