Starting this year, Digital Learning Day is celebrated worldwide every March 19. This is a date established by UNESCO resolution at its 42nd annual meeting that took place in Paris from November 7 to 22, 2023.
The creation of this day is based on the need to strengthen the links between education and technology, which were tragically exposed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The greatest losses due to the interruption of in-person attendance were suffered by those countries with insufficient ICT infrastructure and without digital learning systems. It is estimated that up to a third of the world’s boys and girls did not have adequate access to learning in 2020, many of whom still carry the consequences of that imponderable event.
Andrés Quinn, COO of OCP TECH (a technology integrator company that offers innovative solutions in seventeen countries in the region), believes that the pandemic revealed in all its harshness the pressing need to create a bridge between technologies that deepen learning and teachers and students, to transform traditional education into a system that is inclusive, open and resilient. “That’s what the day we celebrate today is about. I fervently believe in using these commemorations to enhance the path of our social impact and the development of our business missions linked to education. In our case, we seek to transform and develop technological solutions that generate an impact on the lives of people, companies and governments with the best talent on the market.”
Taking into account this context resulting from the pandemic, UNESCO has prioritized the development of a strategy aimed at groups that, beyond common efforts, continue to be marginalized: low-income people, people with disabilities, linguistic minorities and cultural, and, in many countries still, women.
The key to expanding digital teaching in a new educational revolution is Open Educational Resources (OER). These are teaching, learning or research materials that are freely accessible to everyone, and that UNESCO has actively developed and funded since 2012. That year, in Paris, the Declaration on Open Educational Resources was signed, which established several axes on which to work: promoting the use of OER; facilitate environments that enable the use of ICT; promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks; support training for the sustainable development of quality learning materials; foster strategic alliances for OERs that provide content in a variety of languages and cultural contexts; and finally, promote research on these open educational resources, especially those that are made with public funds.
The OER gain importance in the context of Digital Learning Day for a simple reason: their free nature makes them an ideal ally to close the educational gap between countries, which is nothing other than the gap between those who have many resources to invest. in digital education, and those who have less. For UNESCO, guaranteeing the structure and development of solutions that facilitate access is another of the challenges to be met.
For Quinn, the spirit that guides the OER (sense of community, accessibility and a share of altruism) are values that should challenge those who make up the technology sector. “Perhaps like never before, technology today offers the necessary conditions (internet, networks, affordable devices) to make one of the most important desires of the digital age a reality: that of promoting free, quality education to all corners of the world. . The ideal proposed by digital learning literally puts us on the threshold of a new paradigm that has the potential to change the economic, cultural and even political profile of global society.”
The creation of this new international day is an invitation to reflect on the importance that education has today, the impact that a responsible digitalization process can have on it, and the transformative spirit of technology and the Internet put at the service of human development.
Source: Ambito
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