Action Line C4 Capacity Building: New teaching approaches for higher learning in the digital era Academia roundtable

Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” by 2030. This goal calls for an upgrade of education facilities and programs to create learning environments that are inclusive and responsive. ICTs play a key role in supporting the achievement of this SDG. The use of ICTs in education is growing as ICTs are now used both for development and design of training programmes as well as for training delivery. While the structure and format of training continue to change, the physical environment, in which training is done, has remained the same over the years. Universities and other training institutions around the world deliver the majority of their trainings in auditoriums or physical facilities of a similar design, which has proven to present challenges for delivery of training using technology.   

The academia community has undertaken research to investigate how the physical facilities affect the adoption of pedagogies that require the use of ICTs and how this affects the inclusiveness and quality of its courses. The researches undertaken discuss how the physical design of educational rooms can create functional learning environments that are suited to new pedagogies and current generation of students.  

In light of the above, AL C4 session will be organized in collaboration with the membership department of ITU. The session will be conducted as a roundtable for academia, where the academia community will discuss research findings presented in a paper developed through exploring studies on the use of technology in a traditional classroom, and the use of traditional pedagogies in highly technological classrooms. The session will draw recommendations on how the learning environments can be adapted to support new pedagogies and how traditional pedagogies could be redesigned to accommodate requirements of the current generation of students.  

Research findings will be presented during the session and a panel of experts from different universities will share their experiences in relation to the research findings, discussing opportunities and challenges experienced in their own environments, as well as proposing strategies that universities can use to improve the effectiveness of their training delivery methods