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Dirigir la Transformación Digital

The Declaration

La Declaración Mundial sobre la Conectividad para la Educación de Rewired proporciona una nueva orientación para la transformación digital de la educación.

Emitida en diciembre de 2021 durante la cumbre RewirEd, establece principios y compromisos para garantizar que las tecnologías conectadas promuevan las aspiraciones de una educación inclusiva basada en los principios de justicia, equidad y respeto de los derechos humanos.

La Declaración se apoya en las enseñanzas de la pandemia de COVID-19 y señala que, sin un cambio de rumbo, la integración tecnológica en la educación podría aumentar el aislamiento de los alumnos, profundizar las desigualdades, limitar las experiencias de aprendizaje y privatizar la educación, lo que pone en peligro su calidad de bien público.

1 Connectivity Declaration

La Declaración representa el fruto de un año de investigación y refleja las conclusiones de varias consultas mundiales. El texto final establece líneas de acción para garantizar que el potencial de las herramientas digitales fortalezca las oportunidades de aprendizaje para todos.

La Declaración propone tres principios centrales a fin de dirigir los esfuerzos internacionales, nacionales y locales para lograr una tecnología que permita una educación centrada en la persona.

El primer principio consiste en ubicar a los más marginados en el centro de escena. A menudo la tecnología y la innovación benefician solamente a los más privilegiados. Debemos rediseñar nuestras políticas y acciones para que estén al servicio de aquellos que más necesitan oportunidades. Plantearnos cómo la tecnología ayudará a los refugiados, los alumnos con discapacidad, los docentes en zonas remotas y las niñas y mujeres debe ser un punto de partida, no una consideración tardía.

El segundo principio consiste en aumentar la inversión en contenido educativo digital abierto, gratuito y de calidad. Demasiadas iniciativas tecnológicas incluyen únicamente dispositivos conectados a internet. Con esto no alcanza. La conectividad debe proporcionar recursos pedagógicos ricos y posibilitar interacciones que promuevan el aprendizaje y el desarrollo. Todos los países deberían contar con alternativas públicas para la educación pública en internet.

El tercer principio establece que la transformación digital de la educación requiere cambios e innovaciones pedagógicas. Debemos dejar de intentar reproducir modelos escolares presenciales en espacios digitales. Los entornos virtuales y en línea necesitan nuevos tipos de contenido pedagógico y nuevas formas de enseñar y aprender. Debemos aprovechar el potencial multimedial e interactivo que caracteriza a las tecnologías conectadas y combinarlo con lo mejor de la educación presencial.

Texto de la Declaración

El texto de la Declaración se reproduce a continuación. También puede consultar y compartir el texto en formato PDF haciendo clic aquí.

2 Connectivity Declaration

THE REWIRED GLOBAL DECLARATION ON CONNECTIVITY FOR EDUCATION

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Charting a New Course

Connected technology must advance our aspirations for inclusive education based on principles of social and economic justice, equity, and respect for human rights.

We—the supporters of this Declaration—are convinced that, in addition to enlarging access to information and knowledge, connected technology can enrich educational processes and improve learning outcomes.

From enabling anytime and anywhere learning to assisting students with disabilities, technology is an important site of educational opportunity and innovation. We are encouraged by the ways it can help automate once-laborious administrative tasks, provide immediate feedback and support, and bridge formal education with informal learning. When appropriately steered, technology opens new and more inclusive avenues for teaching and learning.

But we are also clear-eyed about the risks—many of them novel or still only coming into focus.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw how connected technology can heighten learning inequalities, increase student isolation, narrow educational experiences, and privatize education, undermining its standing as a public good. We have also seen it deployed to constrain knowledge, polarize our societies, and spread misinformation in education and beyond.

Going forward, we need a new orientation. This Declaration, reflecting inputs from a global consultation process led by UNESCO, sets forth norms and understandings to make technology a stronger and more reliable ally of the humanistic aims of education. The text illuminates inclusive, equitable and sustainable approaches to better integrate increasingly ubiquitous digital tools in education.

 

Point of Departure

This Declaration recognizes that work to make technology a force for good in education is framed by two interrelated challenges.

First, technical and material access to connectivity remain woefully insufficient with approximately two out of every three children and youth having no internet access at home. This is an alarming gap in our information and digital age, and it demands bold investment to assure universal access to the internet—a mobilization that includes but also extends well beyond the education sector. In addition to this global gap, digital divides between countries are staggering. In high-income countries nearly 90 per cent of school-aged children and adolescents are connected. In low-income countries this figure is often under 10 per cent. And scarcity aside, connectivity in poor countries tends to be slow and unreliable, hampering its educational potential.

Second, capacity gaps remain a persistent obstacle to connected education. Inadequate digital skills and competencies rank as the single greatest barrier to technology use for education, and this regardless of a country’s development status. Digital skills gaps tend to be most pronounced for parents, followed by teachers, followed by students, indicating that connected education is dependent on digitally literate societies. Opportunities to develop the knowledge and skills required to leverage connected technology for learning and other socially beneficial purposes need to be stepped up immediately, especially for girls and women who tend to have lower levels of digital skills than men and boys. Education is an important site for building digital skills and applying them. When learners, teachers and families have strong digital competencies, connected technologies become more versatile tools for education.

With these twin challenges in mind, we resolve to better ensure that technology fulfils the diverse and ambitious objectives societies ascribe to education. We cannot continue on a course of watching education contort to the often-exclusionary logics and business models of private sector technology companies. The educational promises of technology will be realized by adhering to principles that put technology at the service of learners, teachers, and educational institutions.

 

Core Principles

Three core principles, each with underlying commitments, will help ensure that the digital transformation of education accelerates progress towards the education commitments of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Operationalizing these principles will require a whole-of-government approach and should draw inspiration and guidance from the UN Secretary General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation.

 

Principle 1: Centre the most marginalized

Connectivity and technology must be deployed to help close growing educational divides. Too often, they benefit privileged learners and educators first. Only later do strategies emerge to make them more inclusive and accessible to those who are disadvantaged. Such approaches mirror and widen educational inequity. We must recalibrate our policies, actions, and investments to centre learners most in need of opportunities. This will help bridge inequalities, spark needed innovation, and make solutions easier to ‘scale out’ to more privileged groups. Asking how approaches can work for refugees, for students with disabilities, for girls and women, for teachers in remote areas, and for other underprivileged learners and educators needs to be a point of departure. Universal or expanded connectivity has long been associated with strengthened economic output. Going forward it should also correlate with improved and more equitable learning outcomes. The right to education must also evolve to better reflect the many ways education has become dependent on connectivity, a reliance that is likely to continue to deepen in the future.

1a) We commit to help ensure connectivity reaches all individual learners. For connectivity to truly equalize educational opportunity, it needs to enable anytime, anywhere internet access for individual students and teachers. Connectivity initiatives should be guided by an ethic of inclusion and begin with those facing disadvantage. The urgent task ahead is ubiquitous connectivity—ideally, an internet connection that is always available. This ‘untethered’ access, powered by mobile networks and devices, opens far more possibilities for education than ‘tethered’ access. It also facilitates informal learning opportunities and can help out-of-school youth find pathways back to formal education or build livelihoods. Efforts to assure connectivity reaches and follows learners and educators should be grounded in a rationale of educational equality. They must also be accompanied by expanded and improved digital skills training, so students and teachers can make productive use of connections for education. Giga and other initiatives are rightly using education as a cause and a means to move the world closer to universal connectivity.

1b) We commit to help ensure sustainable financing of universal connectivity for education. As connectivity becomes an increasingly vital portal to education and other essential rights and services, it has quickly transitioned from luxury consumer good to essential infrastructure. Yet public financing to assure universal connectivity remains tepid. More robust, predictable, and sustained investments are necessary to give every man, woman, boy and girl a reliable connection to the internet. This is not a one-time expenditure. Backsliding remains an ever-present risk. Around the world many schools, teachers, and learners that were digitally connected to the internet, no longer are. Connectivity that is established and sustained will help assure wider and more equitable access to knowledge and information. The promise of connected technology to function as an educational equalizer hinges on universal and sustainable access to this technology.

1c) We commit to help assure clear and affordable connectivity for education options. The profusion of options for connectivity plans available on the market are often a source of confusion. Their mounting complexity presents challenges for people who want to link to the internet for educational purposes. The public, including people with limited literacy skills, should be able to quickly distinguish which connectivity plans provide a suitable portal to learning and educational opportunities—and likely other opportunities outside the purview of education—that advance the public good. Governments should consider mandating that internet and mobile service providers offer basic and easy-to-understand ‘connectivity for education’ plans or credits at fixed or subsidized-rates. People who want a basic connectivity option to support education should be able to find it. As education becomes increasingly reliant on connectivity, it must progressively be folded into state commitments to provide free and inclusive quality public education.

1d) We commit to ensure that connected technology supplements, expands, and enriches high-quality, formal and in-person education, rather than replace it. Schools and educational institutions, as well as teachers and educators, should remain the primary interface of education. This is especially important for disadvantaged students for whom schools often provide nutrition, protection, and other benefits beyond academic learning. Digital-only approaches do not fulfil a state’s obligation to provide quality education with its associated services. With rare exception, compulsory schooling should require attendance at a physical school. While digital spaces may one day be able to serve as primary or even singular hubs of formal learning, this day is not yet here. Societies have made enormous investments to provide all children and youth opportunities to learn in schools with professional teachers — they must ensure technology supports this effort and does not hinder work to make in-person schooling universally available. Connected technologies will change and improve what happens at schools, but schools retain special importance as physical and social places that help societies realize their diverse goals for education. In situations where connected learning is a major component of education and at a moment when young people are spending half or more of their waking lives navigating digital worlds, governments and other stakeholders should consider the need for rights and permissions to ‘disconnect’. While school-based education is and should remain compulsory, it is less clear if calls to use digital technologies for learning purposes, especially for long and uninterrupted periods of time, should also be compulsory. Just as there might be the beginnings of a right to connectivity under the right to education, there might also be the need for a right to unconnected education.

 

Principle 2: Expand investments in free and high-quality digital education content

Connectivity is valuable for educational purposes to the extent that it opens doors to high-quality educational content and interactions that facilitate learning and development. Too often, technology initiatives stop and end with internet-connected devices. In the context of education, meaningful connectivity is connectivity that catalyses human-centred learning experiences by assuring users have appropriate devices, enough data and fast connections to regularly access the internet. Open, free, and high-quality digital learning content makes connectivity more valuable and establishes demand for it. While barriers to connected education are often framed as supply problems, demand is also important. Building virtual destinations that are beneficial to students, teachers, parents, and educational institutions means that all these stakeholders will make greater effort to establish and maintain portals to these destinations.

2a) We commit to finance the development and maintenance of robust public options for public education on the internet. Freely accessible digital learning platforms aligned with national curriculum will include engaging, accredited, well-organized and easy-to-find digital learning content that is accessible to all from a wide range of internet-connected devices. Offerings should enable and encourage collaboration and exchange between students and educators. User interfaces and functionality should also be optimized for use on mobile phones, in addition to laptop and desktop computers, due to the growing ubiquity of internet-connected mobile devices. Efforts will further be made to consolidate this state-provisioned educational content under a single roof—a one-stop-shop for education—rather than scattered across various sites and locations. This will help improve recognition and usability of learning content and assure trust and accountability for public resources. Finally, government-provided digital learning platforms should, when possible, include functionality to recognize and validate learning.

2b) We commit to provide differentiated educational resources for diverse audiences. Publicly funded digital destinations for education should have, at a minimum, clear entry points for learners, teachers, and families and other caregivers. Content should be aligned with national curriculum, developed in consultation with educators, regularly accredited, and searchable by learning courses and grade level. Different languages relevant to learners should be supported whenever possible. Platforms should further allow teachers opportunities to collaborate with each other and tailor materials for students according to their professional judgement. Building communities of practice and curating, remixing, and creating digital learning resources should feature prominently in teacher training. As a public resource, digital education platforms must be iteratively developed and improved according to the needs of the diverse stakeholders in education.

2c) We commit to monitor adaptation and application of digital education utilities. Proxies beyond access to connected technology are needed to measure the intentional adaptation and meaningful application of connected technology for education. Novel forms of data monitoring and qualitative as well as quantitative research and information are needed to show whether and how connectivity access is (or is not) productively used to improve teaching and learning. Publicly provided repositories of learning content targeting learners, teachers and families can provide valuable data about what digital tools and resources are being used for educational purposes, by whom, and to what extent. This information should help guide the development of digital learning content and other resources to better leverage connected technology for education, as well as assess its value vis-à-vis other investments.

 

Principle 3: Moving education to digital spaces requires pedagogical innovation and change

Digital spaces can foster new and effective pedagogies that expand student knowledge, trigger new thinking, nurture creativity, and foster responsible digital citizenship. At the same time, digital spaces can place rigid limitations on students and teachers that constrain learning and intellectual freedom. Efforts should be made to ensure that the digital transformation of education opens rather than closes learning possibilities and both models and teaches healthy use of connected technologies.

3a) We commit to use digital spaces to advance new paradigms and possibilities for learning. Much of the digital learning content currently available does not do enough to take advantage of the interactive and multimedia capabilities of computer-mediated mediums. Too much effort is expended trying to replicate models of in-person schooling in digital spaces. Online and virtual environments demand new types of learning content and new pedagogies. Teachers as well as families need to be involved in the development of digitally supported education and receive training to maximize the unique educational affordances of connected technologies, while also understanding the many limitations of these tools. This training should be device and platform agnostic, rather than outsourced to private sector technology corporations that tend to certify teachers only in the use of proprietary tools and services. More innovation is needed to develop and test new digital and hybrid pedagogies that are less reliant on the closed systems of private sector digital providers and the capacities of individual schools. Research will continue to clarify the distinct advantages and disadvantages of physical, virtual and hybrid learning environments. It is necessary to leverage the unique affordances of each one and place them in more harmonious balance to assure a holistic human-centred educational experience.

3b) We commit to use technology to strengthen social and civic dimensions of learning. While the personalization of education made possible by connected technologies holds potential to perhaps accelerate and improve student learning, it can also distort understandings of education as a public endeavour and a common good. In addition to empowering individuals, connected technology should function to strengthen social and civic goals for learning in online and offline spaces. There are many models for teaching and learning with technology, and not all of them are dependent on students having their own devices or working alone in front of screens. Efforts should also be made to better align digital and non-digital learning so that students and teachers feel they are working towards common and community-agreed educational objectives, regardless of medium. Connectivity is at the core of connected education, and this should mean connections to teachers, to peers, to a school, and to a community, in addition to connections to machine-mediated learning content.

3c) We commit to protect student and educator data. The ease of data capture, storage, and surveillance in digital spaces must be a primary concern for education. It should help improve teaching and learning rather than merely document and control it. Used appropriately, data can clarify what interventions are more and less effective and guide their future development. Most data should be anonymized by default, particularly data used beyond the level of schools, so it cannot be traced back to individuals. Proper rules and protocols are needed to protect the rights of learners, particularly children. Education is a site of experimentation and identity formation, and students need freedom to take risks and make mistakes in online and offline environments built on trust and good will. An ethic of transparency and ‘do no harm’ should guide data policies. All stakeholders should be aware of what data is being captured and for what purposes. This disclosure must be easily comprehended and include options to communicate problems and seek recourse. Educational institutions should work to assure individuals own and control their personal data, and, in the case of children, families should be actively involved in decision-making. When possible, learners should be able to ‘opt-out’ of data capture and still retain full access to educational opportunities.

3d) We commit to promote safe and productive use of the internet through education. A major reason to use connected technologies in educational contexts is to help students learn how to navigate the internet responsibly. An end goal of education should be to prepare learners to use connected technology in healthy, safe, and productive ways. We will seek to gradually loosen restrictions on the use of connected technology as education advances, including for use during examinations. It is paradoxical to make major investments in connecting learners only to insist that they disconnect whenever this learning is assessed. Efforts should also be made to help students build critical understandings of digital ecosystems and skills to use and create within these ecosystems, while remaining vigilant about their digital footprints and reputations. Blanket bans on the use of connected technologies in educational contexts should be discouraged because they tend to obstruct educational opportunities and inhibit innovation. Finally, we will support more ambitious experimentation and research with controlled and uncontrolled uses of technology in education to better align formal learning with a world in which connectivity permeates so many facets of life.

 

Afterword

Connected technologies are rapidly altering the ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ of learning.

This Declaration asserts that 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.

The principles and commitments put forward here will help ensure that these changes, still in their early phases, advance our highest aims for education and are guided by commitments to human rights, inclusion, equity, environmental sustainability, and social justice. The Declaration underscores our resolve to better centre the most marginalized learners, assure free and high-quality digital learning content, and catalyse pedagogical changes needed to ensure that connected technologies strengthen, rather than subvert, human-centred education that is available to all.

We call on each other and our respective organizations to help operationalize this Declaration, translating its aspirations into actions. Through cooperation and shared ambition, we can help make connected education an on-the-ground reality for learners and teachers everywhere.

 

 

Justificación y desarrollo

Implementación

Contacto

UNESCO Headquarters

7 Place de Fontenoy
75007 Paris, France

División Futuro del Aprendizaje e Innovación

futuresofeducation@unesco.org

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