BDT Director Doreen Bogdan-Martin gave opening remarks at the 2020 edition of ITU/UNESCO's Mobile Learning Week, themed “Beyond Disruption: Technology enabled learning futures". This year, Mobile Learning Week examined the medium and long-term implications of the unprecedented global educational disruption caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Ministers of Education and ICT, policy-makers, international organizations, private sector partners, civil society organizations, researchers, teachers, education leaders and practitioners participated in the event, which sought to draw lessons from the range of education responses deployed in the wake of the pandemic, in order to inform the planning of technology-enabled inclusive and resilient learning systems.
In her opening address, Ms Bogdan-Martin noted that 1.5 billion students have been affected by rolling school closures across the world. The dual crisis impacting public health and education poses challenges ahead to those working in the digital learning space, but has also turbo-charged work with tremendous potential for positive outcomes, she said.
Due to the COVID crisis, 94% of young learners were pushed out of school, and countries were forced to switch to online learning platforms almost overnight. Ms Bogdan-Martin noted that while that has worked well for a few, there remain billions that are yet without access to meaningful broadband connectivity.
An estimated 250 million children still remain out of school. Ms Bogdan-Martin said, “with 30% of youth aged 15 to 24 lacking any kind of Internet access at all, we can only imagine the catastrophic effect this loss of learning could have on these young people's future prospects", observing that young girls are at special risk. Recently, the Malala Foundation warned that 20 million school-age girls impacted by school closures may never get the chance to resume their education once the pandemic has abated.
Ms Bogdan-Martin drew attention to the need for new financing models to get network infrastructure into underserved communities, side by side with equipping people with digital skills to use technology-enabled learning tools. “Teachers need to understand how to use and capitalize on online learning environments. And students need the skills to engage with those environments in a productive and effective manner," she said.
While stressing that computers cannot replace teachers, Ms Bogdan-Martin said connecting students and teachers to the wealth of information on the most accessible library ever conceived – the internet – in languages they can understand, could be the most powerful engine of transformation the world has ever seen.
During her address, she also announced the launch of the 2020 edition of ITU's Digital Skills Insights, a publication that serves as a rich knowledge resource for all policy makers, academics and practitioners working towards reducing the digital skills gap.
