Evidence-driven Public Policies for Digital Education
Ceibal Foundation in association with the International Development Research Center presents the regional network Alliance for Digitalization of Education in Latinamerica (ADELA). The network is integrated by nine countries from Latin American and Caribbean (LAC).
Project presentation
The Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region suffers from deep structural problems in education (e.g. low student performance, poor teacher training, high dropout rates, and important socio- economic inequalities). All of which weighs more heavily on girls than boys. Regional governments have spent over $2 billion USD on personal digital devices during last 10 years. However, those investments in educational technology are not reflected in better learning performance. Moreover, accountability and evaluation of investments and programs are scarce or totally absent. There is a critical need to consolidate institutional capacities in the sector and build policies based on evidence of what works and what doesn’t in digital education.
Three areas are identified as critical to consolidate the effectiveness of today’s digital education policies. These “key areas” can better prepare the region to address the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its social implications:
a. 21st century and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) skills:
Strategies and policies to promote them as well as methodologies focused on designing, implementing and assessing them.
o What are the more critical skills that will be needed in the next decades? Are educational systems providing the best conditions to develop and promote those skills?
o Are the national education policies aligned with the needs and challenges that the society 4.0 is posing today and in the coming decades? What changes need to be considered?
o Where are the new educational role models and strategies in a society that is demanding more knowledge and learning than attendance to school and graduation under the traditional formal education regime?
b. Assessing the impact of digital education:
Data-driven techniques and methods ensuring privacy protection to support educational policies based on the evidence provided by big data research as well as on experimental assessment.
- Have the assessment instruments and strategies evolved accordingly with the transformations of the current pedagogical models?
- What are the most effective methodologies to identify evidence-based results that provide critical information for decision making?
- What are the opportunities, challenges and limitations of implementing Randomized Control Trials (RCT)?
- To what extent Big data in education (i.e. learning analytics, educational data mining) can become a critical tool for monitoring and evaluation to improve teaching and learning in a more personalized fashion?
c. Teacher professional development:
Evidence-based policies, guidelines, methodologies and technologies to deploy and scale effective teacher professional development (TPD) programs.
- What are the more appropriate strategies and methodologies to offer high-quality teacher training at scale?
- What are the best teacher professional development practices that can be replicated across the region?
- What are the resources (funding, staff, technology, time, etc.) needed to offer teacher professional development at scale?
General Objective:
To generate policy relevant knowledge to facilitate more inclusive, equitable and quality education through digital tools.
Project Specific Objectives:
- To test, adapt or scale promising digital innovations to improve learning in LAC, with a focus on marginalized communities.
- To strengthen government’s capacity to use evidence-based knowledge in digital education policy making.
- To build a regional community of research centers and policymakers responsible for digital education in LAC to promote the adoption of evidence-based policy solutions.
Component A: Research
A.1 Call for Research Projects. The project will provide resources to study, experiment and replicate innovations in digital education to generate evidence of what works and what doesn´t to support learning improvements among the most disadvantaged citizens of the region.
A. 2 Thematic Working Groups (TWG). To achieve objective 1, the project will also create TWGs, which are primarily focused on, but not limited to, the “key areas”. All TWGs will include gender perspective, scalability, cost-effectiveness analysis, and ethical and privacy issues. TWGs will gather and collaborate for short periods of time (4–6 months). TWGs will consist of thematic experts and policy makers interested in tackling specific problems in modern education. TWG members will seek to produce actionable reports and guidelines (handbooks, white papers, policy toolkits, etc.) to support the adoption of effective solutions in digital education among member countries.
Component B: Institutional Mechanisms
B. 1 Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM) To promote the adoption of evidence-based policy decisions, the project will implement an RRM as a consultative service to respond to time-sensitive problems and the needs of policymakers. This service provides an opportunity for decision makers to ask for expert advice. Timely response is critical for policymakers to effectively respond to policy demands.
Component C: Regional Community Building
C. 1 Web Platform: Virtual communication, knowledge exchange, documents repository, a directory of regional and global experts, relevant research findings, internal channels of communication and the use of social network tools are among the channels of coordination and communication that the digital platform will provide to the community.
C.2 Annual Conference: A regional/global gathering of researchers and policymakers to discuss, analyze and connect problems and solutions will take place on an annual basis. Existing regional meetings in the field of digital education are weak in providing concrete, specific and implementable solutions to the learning challenges that the region is currently facing. .
C.3 Winter School: Staying up to date on new knowledge in digital education is crucial to the success of any initiative in this rapidly changing sector. Annual week-long international academic/policy gathering will take place to discuss and analyze research results, relevant trends and inter-institutional collaboration between the participants. This initiative, is not only organized to exchange cutting-edge research and innovations but also to promote and facilitate collaborations among participants and their institutions.
Expected Outcomes
It is expected that a majority of the corpus of knowledge (reports and studies) generated are used by decision makers, opinion leaders or practitioners in the region and elsewhere to inform their digital education decisions.
The initiative seeks to promote the creation of “innovation labs” within governments of the region focused on evaluating monitoring, and supporting evidence-based practices and policies to leverage existing and future digital education innovations.
The third outcome will be the development of a sustainable regional community of research centers and policymakers responsible for digital education in LAC.
Find more information: here
