it digital education

How technology is reinventing education

Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and other education scholars weigh in on what's next for some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom.

Image credit: Claire Scully

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

• Schools & departments

What is digital education?

Defining digital education, plus University of Edinburgh strategy and vision in this area.

Digital education is the innovative use of digital tools and technologies during teaching and learning, and is often referred to as Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) or e-Learning. Exploring the use of digital technologies gives educators the opportunity to design engaging learning opportunities in the courses they teach, and these can take the form of blended or fully online courses and programmes.

Blended learning

"Blended approaches use multiple methods to deliver learning by combining face-to-face interactions with online activities" From:   Blended learning 'starter tool', Higher Education Academy

An example of blended learning is the flipped classroom where online activities are completed outside the classroom providing an opportunity for more in-depth discussion during the face-to-face time spent in class.

The Teaching Matters Blog contains a number of examples of blended and flipped learning

Teaching Matters blog - flipped learning posts

Online Learning

Online learning offers many benefits for students, including the chance to study flexibly and from a location that suits.

Many of the benefits of online learning are outlined in more detail on the University's Postgraduate Online Learning website . 

See the online learning pages for more information about online learning and the support available

Online learning

Vision and Strategy for Digital Education

Digital Education is a core theme of the University's Learning and Teaching Strategy (PDF)

We will develop and enhance our curriculum by:… Committing to the creative use of digital technologies in our teaching and assessment where appropriate whether online, blended or on-campus; We will recruit and nurture excellent teaching staff by:... Pursuing the aspiration that every educator is a digital educator, and that all teaching staff are supported in the appropriate use of the full breadth of learning technologies; Source: University of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Strategy

The future of digital education at Edinburgh

The Near Future Teaching project has been collaborating with staff and students to co-design the future of digital education at the University.

Near Future Teaching - main website

A short video introduction to the project (opens in Media Player)

A number of themes have emerged from the project and these are explored in more depth in a series of video posts on the Teaching Matters blog. Themes explored have included Too Much Tech, Learning & Creativity, Community and Distance, and Data and Automation.

Teaching Matters blog - Near Future Teaching theme

Near Future Teaching project outputs also include two reviews of key trends:

Future Teaching trends: education and society

Future Teaching trends: science and technology

The project is now at a consolidation and testing stage, and expects to report on the vision of digital education at Edinburgh by the end of 2018.

Approaches to Digital Education

Examples of some of the approaches to Digital Education can be found in the Teaching Matters Blog - Digital Education theme

The 2018 Learning and Teaching conference had a Digital Education theme and the programme highlights some innovative practices in teaching and learning from across the University. The keynotes and other conference resources are available on the conference website .

It is helpful to plan digital education approaches at the course or programme design stage. Considering what digital technologies to use during the design (or re-design) stage gives the course and programme teams an opportunity to adopt digital education approaches that suit their particular context.

Further support on course and programme design

Questions about Digital Education?

Please get in touch with Celeste McLaughlin.

Celeste McLaughlin

Head of Academic Development for Digital Education

Contact details

• Work: 0131 651 4513
• Email: [email protected]

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Information and communication technology (ICT) in education

Information and communications technology (ict) can impact student learning when teachers are digitally literate and understand how to integrate it into curriculum..

Schools use a diverse set of ICT tools to communicate, create, disseminate, store, and manage information.(6) In some contexts, ICT has also become integral to the teaching-learning interaction, through such approaches as replacing chalkboards with interactive digital whiteboards, using students’ own smartphones or other devices for learning during class time, and the “flipped classroom” model where students watch lectures at home on the computer and use classroom time for more interactive exercises.

When teachers are digitally literate and trained to use ICT, these approaches can lead to higher order thinking skills, provide creative and individualized options for students to express their understandings, and leave students better prepared to deal with ongoing technological change in society and the workplace.(18)

ICT issues planners must consider include: considering the total cost-benefit equation, supplying and maintaining the requisite infrastructure, and ensuring investments are matched with teacher support and other policies aimed at effective ICT use.(16)

Issues and Discussion

Digital culture and digital literacy: Computer technologies and other aspects of digital culture have changed the ways people live, work, play, and learn, impacting the construction and distribution of knowledge and power around the world.(14) Graduates who are less familiar with digital culture are increasingly at a disadvantage in the national and global economy. Digital literacy—the skills of searching for, discerning, and producing information, as well as the critical use of new media for full participation in society—has thus become an important consideration for curriculum frameworks.(8)

In many countries, digital literacy is being built through the incorporation of information and communication technology (ICT) into schools. Some common educational applications of ICT include:

• One laptop per child: Less expensive laptops have been designed for use in school on a 1:1 basis with features like lower power consumption, a low cost operating system, and special re-programming and mesh network functions.(42) Despite efforts to reduce costs, however, providing one laptop per child may be too costly for some developing countries.(41)
• Tablets: Tablets are small personal computers with a touch screen, allowing input without a keyboard or mouse. Inexpensive learning software (“apps”) can be downloaded onto tablets, making them a versatile tool for learning.(7)(25) The most effective apps develop higher order thinking skills and provide creative and individualized options for students to express their understandings.(18)
• Interactive White Boards or Smart Boards : Interactive white boards allow projected computer images to be displayed, manipulated, dragged, clicked, or copied.(3) Simultaneously, handwritten notes can be taken on the board and saved for later use. Interactive white boards are associated with whole-class instruction rather than student-centred activities.(38) Student engagement is generally higher when ICT is available for student use throughout the classroom.(4)
• E-readers : E-readers are electronic devices that can hold hundreds of books in digital form, and they are increasingly utilized in the delivery of reading material.(19) Students—both skilled readers and reluctant readers—have had positive responses to the use of e-readers for independent reading.(22) Features of e-readers that can contribute to positive use include their portability and long battery life, response to text, and the ability to define unknown words.(22) Additionally, many classic book titles are available for free in e-book form.
• Flipped Classrooms: The flipped classroom model, involving lecture and practice at home via computer-guided instruction and interactive learning activities in class, can allow for an expanded curriculum. There is little investigation on the student learning outcomes of flipped classrooms.(5) Student perceptions about flipped classrooms are mixed, but generally positive, as they prefer the cooperative learning activities in class over lecture.(5)(35)

ICT and Teacher Professional Development: Teachers need specific professional development opportunities in order to increase their ability to use ICT for formative learning assessments, individualized instruction, accessing online resources, and for fostering student interaction and collaboration.(15) Such training in ICT should positively impact teachers’ general attitudes towards ICT in the classroom, but it should also provide specific guidance on ICT teaching and learning within each discipline. Without this support, teachers tend to use ICT for skill-based applications, limiting student academic thinking.(32) To sup­port teachers as they change their teaching, it is also essential for education managers, supervisors, teacher educators, and decision makers to be trained in ICT use.(11)

Ensuring benefits of ICT investments: To ensure the investments made in ICT benefit students, additional conditions must be met. School policies need to provide schools with the minimum acceptable infrastructure for ICT, including stable and affordable internet connectivity and security measures such as filters and site blockers. Teacher policies need to target basic ICT literacy skills, ICT use in pedagogical settings, and discipline-specific uses. (21) Successful imple­mentation of ICT requires integration of ICT in the curriculum. Finally, digital content needs to be developed in local languages and reflect local culture. (40) Ongoing technical, human, and organizational supports on all of these issues are needed to ensure access and effective use of ICT. (21)

Resource Constrained Contexts: The total cost of ICT ownership is considerable: training of teachers and administrators, connectivity, technical support, and software, amongst others. (42) When bringing ICT into classrooms, policies should use an incremental pathway, establishing infrastructure and bringing in sustainable and easily upgradable ICT. (16) Schools in some countries have begun allowing students to bring their own mobile technology (such as laptop, tablet, or smartphone) into class rather than providing such tools to all students—an approach called Bring Your Own Device. (1)(27)(34) However, not all families can afford devices or service plans for their children. (30) Schools must ensure all students have equitable access to ICT devices for learning.

Inclusiveness Considerations

Digital Divide: The digital divide refers to disparities of digital media and internet access both within and across countries, as well as the gap between people with and without the digital literacy and skills to utilize media and internet.(23)(26)(31) The digital divide both creates and reinforces socio-economic inequalities of the world’s poorest people. Policies need to intentionally bridge this divide to bring media, internet, and digital literacy to all students, not just those who are easiest to reach.

Minority language groups: Students whose mother tongue is different from the official language of instruction are less likely to have computers and internet connections at home than students from the majority. There is also less material available to them online in their own language, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to their majority peers who gather information, prepare talks and papers, and communicate more using ICT. (39) Yet ICT tools can also help improve the skills of minority language students—especially in learning the official language of instruction—through features such as automatic speech recognition, the availability of authentic audio-visual materials, and chat functions. (2)(17)

Students with different styles of learning: ICT can provide diverse options for taking in and processing information, making sense of ideas, and expressing learning. Over 87% of students learn best through visual and tactile modalities, and ICT can help these students ‘experience’ the information instead of just reading and hearing it. (20)(37) Mobile devices can also offer programmes (“apps”) that provide extra support to students with special needs, with features such as simplified screens and instructions, consistent placement of menus and control features, graphics combined with text, audio feedback, ability to set pace and level of difficulty, appropriate and unambiguous feedback, and easy error correction. (24)(29)

Plans and policies

• India [ PDF ]
• Detroit, USA [ PDF ]
• Finland [ PDF ]
• Alberta Education. 2012. Bring your own device: A guide for schools . Retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/admin/technology/research.aspx
• Alsied, S.M. and Pathan, M.M. 2015. ‘The use of computer technology in EFL classroom: Advantages and implications.’ International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies . 1 (1).
• BBC. N.D. ‘What is an interactive whiteboard?’ Retrieved from http://www.bbcactive.com/BBCActiveIdeasandResources/Whatisaninteractivewhiteboard.aspx
• Beilefeldt, T. 2012. ‘Guidance for technology decisions from classroom observation.’ Journal of Research on Technology in Education . 44 (3).
• Bishop, J.L. and Verleger, M.A. 2013. ‘The flipped classroom: A survey of the research.’ Presented at the 120th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. Atlanta, Georgia.
• Blurton, C. 2000. New Directions of ICT-Use in Education . United National Education Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO).
• Bryant, B.R., Ok, M., Kang, E.Y., Kim, M.K., Lang, R., Bryant, D.P. and Pfannestiel, K. 2015. ‘Performance of fourth-grade students with learning disabilities on multiplication facts comparing teacher-mediated and technology-mediated interventions: A preliminary investigation. Journal of Behavioral Education. 24.
• Buckingham, D. 2005. Educación en medios. Alfabetización, aprendizaje y cultura contemporánea, Barcelona, Paidós.
• Buckingham, D., Sefton-Green, J., and Scanlon, M. 2001. 'Selling the Digital Dream: Marketing Education Technologies to Teachers and Parents.'  ICT, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum: Subject to Change . London: Routledge.
• "Burk, R. 2001. 'E-book devices and the marketplace: In search of customers.' Library Hi Tech 19 (4)."
• Chapman, D., and Mählck, L. (Eds). 2004. Adapting technology for school improvement: a global perspective. Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning.
• Cheung, A.C.K and Slavin, R.E. 2012. ‘How features of educational technology applications affect student reading outcomes: A meta-analysis.’ Educational Research Review . 7.
• Cheung, A.C.K and Slavin, R.E. 2013. ‘The effectiveness of educational technology applications for enhancing mathematics achievement in K-12 classrooms: A meta-analysis.’ Educational Research Review . 9.
• Deuze, M. 2006. 'Participation Remediation Bricolage - Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture.' The Information Society . 22 .
• Dunleavy, M., Dextert, S. and Heinecke, W.F. 2007. ‘What added value does a 1:1 student to laptop ratio bring to technology-supported teaching and learning?’ Journal of Computer Assisted Learning . 23.
• Enyedy, N. 2014. Personalized Instruction: New Interest, Old Rhetoric, Limited Results, and the Need for a New Direction for Computer-Mediated Learning . Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center.
• Golonka, E.M., Bowles, A.R., Frank, V.M., Richardson, D.L. and Freynik, S. 2014. ‘Technologies for foreign language learning: A review of technology types and their effectiveness.’ Computer Assisted Language Learning . 27 (1).
• Goodwin, K. 2012. Use of Tablet Technology in the Classroom . Strathfield, New South Wales: NSW Curriculum and Learning Innovation Centre.
• Jung, J., Chan-Olmsted, S., Park, B., and Kim, Y. 2011. 'Factors affecting e-book reader awareness, interest, and intention to use.' New Media & Society . 14 (2)
• Kenney, L. 2011. ‘Elementary education, there’s an app for that. Communication technology in the elementary school classroom.’ The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications . 2 (1).
• Kopcha, T.J. 2012. ‘Teachers’ perceptions of the barriers to technology integration and practices with technology under situated professional development.’ Computers and Education . 59.
• Miranda, T., Williams-Rossi, D., Johnson, K., and McKenzie, N. 2011. "Reluctant readers in middle school: Successful engagement with text using the e-reader.' International journal of applied science and technology . 1 (6).
• Moyo, L. 2009. 'The digital divide: scarcity, inequality and conflict.' Digital Cultures . New York: Open University Press.
• Newton, D.A. and Dell, A.G. 2011. ‘Mobile devices and students with disabilities: What do best practices tell us?’ Journal of Special Education Technology . 26 (3).
• Nirvi, S. (2011). ‘Special education pupils find learning tool in iPad applications.’ Education Week . 30 .
• Norris, P. 2001. Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide . Cambridge, USA: Cambridge University Press.
• Project Tomorrow. 2012. Learning in the 21st century: Mobile devices + social media = personalized learning . Washington, D.C.: Blackboard K-12.
• Riasati, M.J., Allahyar, N. and Tan, K.E. 2012. ‘Technology in language education: Benefits and barriers.’ Journal of Education and Practice . 3 (5).
• Rodriquez, C.D., Strnadova, I. and Cumming, T. 2013. ‘Using iPads with students with disabilities: Lessons learned from students, teachers, and parents.’ Intervention in School and Clinic . 49 (4).
• Sangani, K. 2013. 'BYOD to the classroom.' Engineering & Technology . 3 (8).
• Servon, L. 2002. Redefining the Digital Divide: Technology, Community and Public Policy . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
• Smeets, E. 2005. ‘Does ICT contribute to powerful learning environments in primary education?’ Computers and Education. 44 .
• Smith, G.E. and Thorne, S. 2007. Differentiating Instruction with Technology in K-5 Classrooms . Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.
• Song, Y. 2014. '"Bring your own device (BYOD)" for seamless science inquiry in a primary school.' Computers & Education. 74 .
• Strayer, J.F. 2012. ‘How learning in an inverted classroom influences cooperation, innovation and task orientation.’ Learning Environment Research. 15.
• Tamim, R.M., Bernard, R.M., Borokhovski, E., Abrami, P.C. and Schmid, R.F. 2011. ‘What forty years of research says about the impact of technology on learning: A second-order meta-analysis and validation study. Review of Educational Research. 81 (1).
• Tileston, D.W. 2003. What Every Teacher Should Know about Media and Technology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
• Turel, Y.K. and Johnson, T.E. 2012. ‘Teachers’ belief and use of interactive whiteboards for teaching and learning.’ Educational Technology and Society . 15(1).
• Volman, M., van Eck, E., Heemskerk, I. and Kuiper, E. 2005. ‘New technologies, new differences. Gender and ethnic differences in pupils’ use of ICT in primary and secondary education.’ Computers and Education. 45 .
• Voogt, J., Knezek, G., Cox, M., Knezek, D. and ten Brummelhuis, A. 2013. ‘Under which conditions does ICT have a positive effect on teaching and learning? A call to action.’ Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. 29 (1).
• Warschauer, M. and Ames, M. 2010. ‘Can one laptop per child save the world’s poor?’ Journal of International Affairs. 64 (1).
• Zuker, A.A. and Light, D. 2009. ‘Laptop programs for students.’ Science. 323 (5910).

Related information

• Information and communication technologies (ICT)

Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education pp 1–17 Cite as

The Rise and Development of Digital Education

• Martin Weller 3  
• Living reference work entry
• Open Access
• First Online: 25 August 2022

2013 Accesses

2 Citations

6 Altmetric

Over the past 25 years, digital education has risen to prominence. It has a direct relationship with open education, which can be considered an umbrella term. In this chapter the rise of digital education is explored through five specific educational technologies. These technologies – the web, Learning Management System (LMS), blogs, social media, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – all raise issues of control and ease of use. They also have a direct impact on different aspects of open education, which in turn helps inform their development. This chapter sets out the multiple interpretations of open education and their overlap with digital education. By then exploring five educational technologies, common themes are extracted which highlight this intersection of digital and open education.

• Digital education
• Online education

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

• Learning Management System (LMS)
• Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)

Download reference work entry PDF

Introduction

Open education is a broad term that has itself undergone evolution and transformation. Weller, Jordan, DeVries, and Rolfe ( 2018 ) used a citation analysis method to investigate different clusters of publications which were associated with open education. This revealed eight distinct categories, namely:

Distance education

Open education in schools

Open Education Resources (OER)

Open Practices

Social Media

Open Access Publishing

There was scant overlap between these clusters of publications, so authors of MOOCs articles, for instance, rarely referenced work on distance education. What this analysis reveals is that open education is not a single entity and practitioners can occupy one aspect with little or no intersection with other forms. For the purpose of this chapter, it also highlights the significance of digital education to different forms of open education. With the exception of earlier articles on distance education and open education in schools, most of these categories have arisen specifically as a function of digital technology. This can be seen with the early shift to publications focusing on “e-learning” in the late 1990s, to MOOCs and OER which are driven by the ability to share resources easily and globally.

In this chapter this trajectory of digital education will be explored through an analysis of several key educational technological developments. The term educational technology is, like “open,” a broad and contested one. In this chapter it encompasses technological developments applied in education, so includes not only specific technologies such as Twitter, but also broader applications of technology, such as learning analytics. Each of the selected technologies has an impact on some aspect of open education, but it is the cumulative effect that is most significant. The intention of such an approach is partly to provide a useful historical perspective, particularly for those new to the field, and also to provide an analysis of how open education is influenced by technology. A more detailed historical analysis from a purely educational technology perspective, rather than an open education one is provided in 25 Years of Ed Tech (Weller, 2020 ). Open education, at least for some of the categories provided above, is often seen as synonymous with digital education, and so there is considerable overlap between these two accounts. Zawacki-Richter et al. ( 2020 ) note the “octopus-like” nature of the term “open” with many tentacles connected to one central concept. These tentacles reach into many different areas, such as MOOCs, OER, open scholarship and open data, each of which itself intersects with aspects of digital education.

Digital education is often, rightly, portrayed as a rapidly changing field, with new technologies, issues and developments arising every year. This sense of rapid change is sometimes used as a motivation or threat to educators to embrace the latest form of technology, otherwise it will be too late to catch up. For example, Rigg ( 2014 ) asked “can universities survive the digital age?” suggesting that universities are too slow to change and are irrelevant to young people embedded in their fast-moving, digital age. This type of article is not uncommon, for instance Janssen ( 2021 ) decries “dear professors, why are you so hesitant to learn something new? … Don’t you love challenging yourself to think in new and different ways? I’m baffled by some of the aversion to 21st-century demands and opportunities.” These types of articles both underestimate the degree to which educators do engage with new technology and also overestimate the digital natives-type narrative that all students want their education to be the equivalent of Instagram. Fullick ( 2014 ) highlighted that this imperative to adopt all technological change immediately and without question has a distinctly Darwinian undertone: “Resistance to change is presented as resistance to what is natural and inevitable” (para. 3).

Engagement with digital education requires practitioners to maintain a delicate balance therefore between succumbing to hype and rhetoric and rejecting all new claims and approaches. One way to navigate this tension is to acquire a certain protection afforded by an historical perspective. However, the digital education field is rather poor at recording its own history and reflecting critically on its development, as if there is no time to look in the rear-view mirror in a field that is solely interested in the future. It is easy to find books about the future of digital education, but relatively difficult to find ones about its past. This historical amnesia is in part the result of a year-zero mentality in the field, for instance, during the MOOC rush of 2012, there were many “new” discoveries about online learning reported which were already tired concepts in the online education field.

By adopting an historical perspective in this chapter then the intention is to counter some of this year zero mentality, and demonstrate the importance of digital education to different aspects of open education. A short note on definitions first though: digital education is a loose term, and at its most literal interpretation could encompass a lecturer using a PowerPoint presentation or writing a book using Word. Such interpretations would not address the more interesting aspects of changing practice in education. Digital education should therefore be interpreted as a convenient shorthand for the intersection of digital, networked and open practices in education. For example, preparing slides for a lecture in PowerPoint to be presented in a face to face lecture and stored on the lecturer’s hard-drive is not really an aspect of digital education, but creating an online webinar which is openly accessible and sharing the content under a Creative Commons license afterward provides an example of the new possibilities (and associated issues) that are under consideration.

Digital Developments

This section will examine the rise of digital education through the lens of different technologies. In this chapter, five significant educational technologies have been selected. The choice of these is subjective, based on the author’s perception of their impact and relevance. Obviously other technologies could be proposed and might provide a different perspective.

The web is probably the most significant of all the technologies relating to digital education, as it laid the foundations for all that followed. While the story of the invention of the web is reasonably well known, it is worth revisiting with the knowledge of how it developed, and to identify the foundations in that development that have come to shape so much of digital education.

In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was working as a software engineer at the large particle physics laboratory, CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research). With scientists from around the world working on different projects and generating large amounts of data and findings, Berners-Lee ( n.d. ) identified that they had difficulty in sharing information, saying that “in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer” (para. 1).

By 1990 Berners-Lee had developed four technologies that made the web functional and that still underpin it:

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, an easy to use language to produce web documents.

URI: Uniform Resource Identifier (also known as URL for Uniform Resource Locator), a means of giving any page on the web a unique address so it can be linked to and located.

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol, a data transfer method that allows web resources to be retrieved across the internet.

Web browser: a piece of software that utilizes the previous three technologies to allow a user to navigate the web.

The fundamental design principles were as significant as the specific technologies in the development of the web. Berners-Lee ( 1989 ) identified that for any such system to succeed it needed to be open, and not a proprietary system owned by any one corporation. The technical attributes of the web can also be seen as giving rise to its social attributes, and why it is such a fundamental driver for openness in education. It was designed as a communication system, around principles of robustness, decentralization and openness.

From these technological features a system evolved which had no central authority, meaning that it was difficult for established agencies to control what was published on the web. What anyone could publish and debate was not governed or censored.

By 1995, the web browser was becoming reasonably commonplace, with Netscape dominating. At this stage, the web still required a degree of technical expertise and was awkward to use, but it was on the way to becoming easy enough, and sufficiently interesting, to be moving beyond purely specialist interest. People regularly made proclamations that no-one would shop online, or that it was the equivalent of Citizen Band radio. Even at the time, these seemed misguided: we could not predict smart phones and ubiquitous Wi-Fi but being able to dial up and connect to information sources anywhere was always going to be revolutionary – and particularly so for education. What the web browser provided was a common tool so that specific software was no longer required for every online function. Prior to this file transfer was performed through File Transfer Protocol (FTP), email through specific clients, bulletin board systems through software such as FidoNet, and so on. The browser provided the potential to unify all these, and more, in one tool.

Even in the simple design afforded by hand-crafted HTML pages, the nascent possibilities of the web for education were evident. Firstly, it made communication, and as a result, networking, much easier. Even though social media didn’t exist yet, it was still possible to find the work of a scholar at another university and send them an email. Secondly, the uploading of publications to your own website marked the beginning of consideration about the dissemination of knowledge and the relationship with publishers which would lead to much of the open access developments. Thirdly, academics began to share teaching resources in this way, which as with publications, would plant the seeds of the open education movement. Most significantly, educators began to explore how it could be used in teaching, and the e-learning boom of the late 1990s took off.

Therefore, in this early development of what became known as Web 1.0 we can see the important aspects of what the web gave education – the freedom to publish, communicate, teach and share. For distance education, which had previously relied on expensive broadcast or shipping physical copies of books, videos, and CDs, this was a significant change. It not only altered how single function distance education institutions such as the Open University operated, but also lowered the cost of entry into the distance education market, so now all other universities could effectively become distance, or hybrid, education providers.

In summary, the web laid the foundation for nearly all the technologies that follow in this chapter and is the one we are still feeling the impact of most keenly. Much of digital education is essentially a variant on the question: what does the web mean for us? In teaching, the development of Learning Management System (LMS), OER, and MOOC, as well as related pedagogic approaches, are all examples of this. In research, the use of blogs, analytics, and Web 2.0 tools have all been significant. For academics and universities responding to the cultural shifts caused by social media, video, and the dark side of the web an understanding of these tools has become strategically important. The removal of the publication filter that the web provided was often touted as the most significant socio-technological change since the invention of the printing press (e.g., Giles, 1996 ) and even now that view does not seem like hyperbole .

Arguably the most successful education technology and the one that has had the biggest impact (for good and bad) is the LMS or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The LMS provided an enterprise solution for e-learning for universities. It stands as the central e-learning technology, despite frequent proclamations of its demise. Prior to the LMS, e-learning provision was realized through a variety of tools, for instance, a bulletin board for communications, a content management system, and home-created web pages. The quality of these solutions was variable, often relying on the enthusiasm of one particular devotee. The combination of tools would also vary across any one university, with the medical school adopting a different set of tools to engineering, which varied again from humanities, and so on. A number of tools such as Virtual-U and FirstClass began to emerge in the 1990s which combined some of these functions.

As e-learning became more central to university provision, both for blended learning and fully online, this variety and reliability became more of an issue. The LMS offered a neat collection of the most popular tools, any one of which might not be as good as the best of the breed-specific tools but good enough, as the web browser had done earlier for internet functions. It allowed for a single, enterprise solution with associated training, technical support, and helpdesk to be implemented across an institution. The advantage of this was that e-learning could progress more quickly across an entire institution if it was driven by strategy. However, over time this has come to seem something of a Faustian pact, with institutions finding themselves locked into contracts with vendors.

LMS uptake grew significantly over the first half of the 2000s, and by 2005 nearly all higher education institutions had deployed an LMS, but only 37% had a single one, with others operating multiple systems, with the intention to move to a single system (OECD, 2005 , p. 124).

It has often been noted that when a new technology arrives, it tends to be used in old ways before its unique characteristics are recognized. This approach applied to much of the early implementation of the LMS. In order to smooth the transition to the online environment, developers started by implementing a familiar model, the virtual classroom. Conole, de Laat, Dillon, and Darby ( 2008 ) found that the LMS was often used as a place to dump notes and to replicate lectures rather than engage in more experimental pedagogies. In this approach, content that can be analogous to lectures is laid out in a linear sequence with discussion forums analogous to tutorials linked to this. This approach should have been an initial step to greater experimentation with online learning, but many institutions became “stuck” at this stage, and the LMS is a primary cause of this. As was seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, this model was still in operation with most universities adopting online lectures via technologies such as Zoom.

One of the issues with enterprise systems such as the LMS is that they require significant investment in terms of finance, expertise, time, and resources. They thus gain a momentum of their own. The reservation many educators have with the LMS is not necessarily the actual technology but rather the institutional “sediment” that builds up around it. For the LMS, this sediment can be seen in the structures that accrue around the system. Institutions invest significant amounts of money on technology and employ people who become experts in using that technology. Accompanying this, they develop administrative structures and processes that are couched in terms of the specific technology. There are roadmaps, guidelines, training programs, and reporting structures, which all help to embed the chosen tool. This creates a form of tool-focused solutionism – if an educator wants to achieve something in their course, and they ask their information technology (IT) services department or educational support team for help, the answer will often be couched in terms of the question, “What is the LMS way of implementing this?”

There have been premature proclamations of the death of the LMS (e.g., Clay, 2009 ; Weller, 2007 ) but it is still going strong. Much like the lecture in higher education, reports of its demise, it seems, are always overstated. The Irish Learning Technology Association published a special issue in 2018 which highlighted the ongoing impact of the LMS, by analyzing responses to the VLEIreland survey, a cross-institutional survey of students in Irish higher education over a number of years. McAvinia and Risquez ( 2018 ) concluded that far from fading, the VLE has evolved:

The newer VLEs and upgrades of the “traditional” brands offer features such as integrated social media tools and e-portfolios, and have lost the visual cues tying them to the classroom, such as book and blackboard imagery. The regeneration of the VLE is remarkable. (p. ii)

Indeed, the robustness of the LMS is one of its main attractions. As institutions begin to offer more provision through their LMS they are also acquiring more reliable data, which enables them to understand learning patterns and behaviors better (e.g., Holmes, Nguyen, Zhang, Mavrikis, & Rienties, 2019 ). The LMS is at the centre of much of the work in digital education, and it can often be an unglamorous role ensuring that a system works effectively for thousands of students. Like universities themselves, part of the appeal of the LMS is its steadfast nature: experimenting with people’s education is not something to be done lightly. But there is a balance to be struck between allowing freedom, innovation, and experimentation and maintaining the core functions. It may be a question of time; education moves slowly, and now that there is a level of stability with the LMS, more experimentation can happen around the fringes.

In summary, the LMS provided a useful means of rapidly developing and unifying e-learning delivery which led to increased uptake of digital education. Much of open education relies on the type of stable platforms provided by the LMS, for example providing OER in formats which can be easily deployed within standard LMS. However, this has sometimes come at the price of a lack of innovation in digital education, and by extension open education .

Blogging developed alongside more education-specific developments, and it was then co-opted into ed. tech. In so doing, it foreshadowed much of the Web 2.0 developments, with which it is often bundled. Blogging was a very obvious extension of the web. Once people realized that anyone could publish on the web, they inevitably started to publish diaries, journals, and regularly updated resources. Blogging emerged from a simple version of online journals when syndication became easy to implement. The advent of feeds, and particularly the universal standard RSS (Really Simple Syndication), provided a means for readers to subscribe to anyone’s blog and receive regular updates. This was as revolutionary as the liberation that web publishing initially provided. If the web made everyone a publisher, then RSS made everyone a distributor.

People swiftly moved beyond journals and in education the ability to create content freely, and have it immediately distributed to a specific audience offered potential teaching opportunities. The use of blogs in education began in the early 2000s and a fledgling community of educational bloggers emerged. This potential to expand the academic community through the informal use of blogs that were external to formal university systems was powerful and would be repeated later with social media. From the perspective of today, with ubiquitous social media, it is difficult to appreciate how liberating the advent of blogging was in higher education.

Blogging provided a new form of academic identity, and one that increasingly became as significant as the traditional identity that is formed through publications, teaching, and research grants. It came with its own cultural norms of informality, acknowledgment, experimentation, and support. This was known to produce tension. For instance, Costa ( 2013 ) has argued that “Higher Education Institutions are more likely to encourage conventional forms of publication than innovative approaches to research communication” (p. 171). The online academic has had to negotiate two worlds simultaneously, which can have different modes of operation and value systems, as Costa ( 2016 ) put it, they end up being double gamers. There is some effort to reconcile these modes with increasing recognition of the value of network identity in achieving scholarly goals, although most remuneration is still linked to traditional outputs, such as published articles and successful research grant income. This is in contrast with the online world that determines prestige through identities and attention (Stewart, 2015 ).

Blogs can be seen as the start of what would become a networked academic identity, which would become more prevalent with the Web 2.0 and social media boom. Veletsianos and Kimmons ( 2012 ) used the term Networked Participatory Scholarship (NPS) to encompass scholars’ use of social networks to “pursue, share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and further their scholarship” (p. 766). This has become a rich area for research as academics wrestle with some of the issues it raises. On the positive side, Stewart ( 2016 ) noted that establishing such an identity increases visibility for pre-tenure academics, and this can offer some protection in a climate of precarious academic labor: “Among the junior scholars and graduate students in the study, opportunities including media appearances, plenary addresses, and even academic positions were credited to long-term NPS investment and residency, and to resultant online visibility” (p. 76).

However, on the negative side, the online world is one which Stewart ( 2016 ) notes can be characterized by “rampant misogyny, racism, and harassment” (p. 62). For all their potential to democratize the online space, such tools frequently reflect and reinforce existing prestige, with higher-ranked universities having more popular Twitter accounts (Jordan, 2017a ), and professors generally developing larger networks than other positions in higher education (Jordan, 2017b ).

Increasingly, as data capitalism and the nefarious uses of our data have come to light, there has been a movement to “own your own domain,” with a blog at the center. That is, to host your own tools on a web domain that is under your control, rather than simply using a third-party service. Watters ( 2016 ) has emphasized that this control and ownership of data is an educational imperative:

When one controls—albeit temporarily—a domain name and a bit of server space, I contend, we act in resistance to an Internet culture and an Internet technology and an Internet business model in which we control little to nothing. We own little to nothing. (para. 04)

Blogs are not just a tool for educators, but increasingly for students also. It is interesting to speculate what the current digital education environment would look like if, in the early days, institutions had adopted blogging platforms as their LMS rather than the commercial products. This is not as far-fetched as it might seem – blogging tools such as WordPress can be constructed to deliver course content and have embedded discussions, and they are easily extendable with plug-ins for specific functions, resembling the sort of service-oriented architecture that was deemed desirable. Templated versions can be implemented for all students, so they have their own space to develop their identity, create assignments, and develop something akin to an e-portfolio (more on this later). In 2008, Jim Groom ( 2008 ) and others were promoting the idea of blogs as educational platforms:

This model puts the power in the hands of the authors, which in turn provides the possibility for a far greater level of educational openness. These are platforms that provide many, if not all, of the features of more traditional LMSs, but exponentially move beyond them given the fact that they benefit from huge open source communities that are constantly enhancing the applications. (Groom, 2008 , para. 01)

What this comparison between the LMS and blogs reveals is more than a difference over software preferences; it reveals differing visions about the nature of digital education, with blogs more aligned to many of the characteristics of openness. For many of the advocates of blogs, the vision of ed-tech is one that embraces the open aspects of the original web. To return to Watters’ ( 2016 ) post on owning your own domain, she claims,

The rest of ed-tech—the LMS, adaptive learning software, predictive analytics, surveillance tech through and through—is built on an ideology of data extraction, outsourcing, and neoliberalism. But the Web—and here I mean the Web as an ideal, to be sure, and less the Web in reality—has a stake in public scholarship and public infrastructure. (para. 26)

Groom and Lamb ( 2014 ) also bemoan this loss of the original vision of the web in how educational technology came to be deployed, and see the LMS as a key component in this:

[h]igher education overall, perhaps concerned about the untamed territories of the open web and facing unquestionably profound challenges in extending its promise beyond the early adopters, cast its lot with a “system” that promised to “manage” this wild potential and peril. (p. 29)

It is not necessarily a binary divide. For instance, there are commercial applications of blogs and of the open-source LMS, so it is more of a continuum. It represents something of a philosophical divide about how people view e-learning, and at its center are degrees of control.

In summary, blogs can be seen as highlighting some of the tension that the previous two educational technologies have brought to the fore. The web provides almost uncontrolled freedom, which comes with issues and implications, while the LMS offers control which can be stifling. Blogs operate somewhere in the middle ground, which is perhaps why they are often a preferred tool for open practitioners such as Groom and Lamb .

If the LMS represents the dominant educational technology, then social media tools such as Twitter and WeChat represent the kind of third-party technology that has been adopted in education. Social media represents the culmination of the paradox that the web unleashed for education, and society in general, in that it is both a toxic, damaging environment that spreads disinformation, but also a useful tool for connecting, sharing and engaging.

Initially Twitter and other social media saw a democratizing effect: formal academic status was not significant since users were judged on the value of their contributions to the network. In educational terms, social media has done much to change the nature of the relationship between academics, students, and the institution. It remains a means of creating a valuable and rewarding network for scholars that brings real benefits. How, then, are we to resolve this quandary of benefit and damage? For some, the benefits are no longer significant enough and they have quit social media.

Educators, then, are faced with having to negotiate complex paradoxes for both themselves and often on behalf of their students. There are several potential uses for social media in teaching and learning, which can be framed as a set of hypotheses. These are not guaranteed findings, but rather potential impacts for which there are some tentative reasons to propose them.

Social media increases student recruitment . The use of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media by universities, students, and staff provides potential students with a good insight into student life and can act as an effective marketing tool (Constantinides & Zinck Stagno, 2011 ).

Social media increases student engagement . The use of social media helps blur boundaries between study and other aspects of life and provides an element that can be fitted in-between other activities in a way that more concentrated study activities cannot, and as such can improve student engagement (Roopchund, Ramesh, & Jaunky, 2019 ).

Social media increases student retention . Students who make social connections tend to stay with their studies (Astleitner, 2000 ). Conventionally, this is realized through societies and social functions. Social media provides a further means to enhance these bonds, and particularly for distance or part-time students.

Higher education has a duty to develop expertise in fake news and misinformation . Mike Caulfield ( 2017 ), who has done much of the work in exploring the impact of misinformation, has developed an online book and a wide range of activities to help develop these skills. They are likely to become increasingly significant as the quality of fake videos and sophisticated targeting improve.

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and KakaoTalk have often achieved an infrastructure-like status for much of the online experience. For instance, for a significant number of users, Facebook is viewed as the entirety of the Internet. Reporting on surveys in Indonesia and Nigeria, Farrell ( 2015 ) stated that “large numbers of first-time adopters come online via Facebook’s proprietary network, rather than via the open web” (para. 08). While these corporations have inveigled their way to infrastructure status, we should remember that providers of physical infrastructure systems such as water, roads, and power have responsibilities and accountability placed upon them. This is relevant to online education, because it highlights the responsibility in mandating the use of such systems and thus increasing their infrastructure-like status and stresses the importance of developing a critical approach to technology in all subject areas.

What social media ultimately provides online education with is a set of tools and possibilities, but these are not without risks and issues. The clearer distinction between professional and personal is deliberately blurred on social media. This can be beneficial, but it also leads to “context collapse.” Marwick and Boyd ( 2011 ) highlighted this issue:

We present ourselves differently based on who we are talking to and where the conversation takes place—social contexts like a job interview, trivia night at a bar, or dinner with a partner differ in their norms and expectations … . The need for variable self-presentation is complicated by increasingly mainstream social media technologies that collapse multiple contexts and bring together commonly distinct audiences. (p. 01)

In other words, we communicate in social media with one audience in mind, but several different audiences might access that content. This context collapse provides both an opportunity, for example in reaching new audiences for research dissemination, and a risk, for example trolls searching for terms to harass people. This is a reflection of what social media does for education as a whole – the context between the university and the rest of society is collapsed. That may be beneficial generally, but when it means conspiracy theorists arrive in a geology discussion to insist the world is flat, it raises problems that we are still incapable of solving.

In summary, social media provides a means of disseminating knowledge and a medium through which much of open practice can flourish. However, it also represents the more extreme aspects of the freedoms that the web originally provided and as such its usage in digital education is complex .

The MOOC phenomenon is an interesting case study in the rise of digital education, particularly how it relates to open education. Such was their growth and hype during 2012 that The New York Times declared it to be “the year of the MOOC” (Pappano, 2012 ). MOOCs can be viewed as the combination of several preceding technologies: some of the open approach of OER, the application of video, and the revolutionary hype of Web 2.0. Early experiments by educators such as George Siemens and Stephen Downes with course design had examined connected pedagogies. These had attracted attention within the online education community, but MOOCs were still widely unknown outside of the field. However, once Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s course on artificial intelligence attracted over 100,000 learners and almost as many headlines (Raith, 2011 ), they gained media interest and significant venture capital. Now that the initial flurry of activity has died down, what can we say about MOOCs?

First of all, their impact has been far less dramatic than was often projected at the start. Sebastian Thrun famously declared that there will only be 10 global providers of higher education by 2022 (Leckart, 2012 ), and that was not the case. Morgan ( 2016 ) argued that “MOOCs prove that universities can and should embrace online learning,” and Godin ( 2016 ) proclaimed MOOCs to be the “first generation of online learning.” As well as overclaiming for the impact of MOOCs, what many of these pieces have in common is a conflation of online learning with MOOCs. For instance, it didn’t take the development of MOOCs to show universities that they should embrace online learning, as Morgan contended.

A consequence of this conflation is that, if MOOCs and the online courses are synonymous, then MOOCs become seen as the only way of realizing online learning. For example, Lewin ( 2013 ) published his article entitled “After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought” in The New York Times on the problems of Thrun’s company, Udacity, and its approach to MOOCs. In this narrative, MOOC failures become the failure of all online learning, and the future of MOOCs becomes the future of all online learning.

Several problems began to emerge with MOOCs after the initial enthusiasm, leading to the reining back on some of the ambitions. The key ones were:

Low Completion Rate – With around only 10% of registered students finishing the course, completion rates have been problematic for MOOCs (Jordan, 2014 ).

Learner Demographics – Most successful MOOC learners were already well educated (Christensen et al., 2013 ), and this finding undermined claims of the MOOC democratizing learning.

Sustainability – As MOOCs became industrialized and required high-quality media outputs, their costs varied considerably, particularly when staff time, marketing, and support were factored in (Hollands & Tirthali, 2014 ). Finding sustainable business models that justified this expenditure has proven problematic.

These issues saw a change in tone around MOOCs, with MOOC provider Coursera ( 2013 ) announcing that it was going to “explore MOOC based learning on campus.” This proposed system resembled conventional blended learning, or e-learning, but on a new platform. Similarly, Georgia Tech announced it was offering a masters-level MOOC, which was not free (costing US$7,000), once again conflating online learning with MOOCs, and Thrun’s company Udacity “pivoted” to focus on corporate training.

Aside from all the hyperbole, what practical applications of MOOCs have emerged? The most obvious one is that millions of people signed up for them and found them an enjoyable and useful learning experience. For example, Farrow, Ward, Klekociuk, and Vickers ( 2017 ) reported on over 11,000 participants in a MOOC on understanding dementia. As educators, the rise of such courses and increased knowledge has to be seen as a positive outcome. There are also examples of their use in formal education to expand the curriculum; for example, the Delft University of Technology offers a “Virtual Exchange Programme,” whereby its campus-based students can take MOOC with other accredited providers and receive credit at Delft (Pickard, 2018 ). Other providers offer routes by which learners’ gain credit for studying in MOOCs and transfer these into a university to count toward a degree. While such models will not appeal to everyone, they do allow increased flexibility in the higher education offering. The more recent interest in “microcredentials,” i.e., shorter courses that carry university credit can also be seen as a consequence of the MOOC approach.

MOOCs also raised the profile of online education, and open practice in particular. Even if MOOCs themselves are only open in terms of enrolment and not in terms of licensing, their presence has a knock-on effect. For example, for many university libraries, curating their open access resources is not a priority because fee-paying students have access to those resources anyway. So, there is no real driver for educators to focus on open access above other resources. But when universities started creating MOOC, this placed pressure on people to use open access resources, because the open learners probably wouldn’t have privileged library access. While we may bemoan that MOOCs themselves are not really open in the sense of openly licensed, they do form part of a larger system, which helps drive openness.

In summary, MOOCs might seem to represent one of the successful alignments of digital and open education. However, many proponents of open education would not consider them truly open, and their commercial drivers have often pushed them toward increasingly conventional models of education .

Conclusions

In this chapter, five significant technologies for digital education have been considered, namely, the web, LMS, blogs, social media and MOOCs. Many other educational technologies could have been addressed also, for example wikis, computer games, mobile technology, learning analytics, and virtual reality. These have all raised the profile and range of possibilities for digital education. In this concluding section analysis can turn to what they represent collectively for open education in particular. The five technologies highlighted here have a number of features in common. First, they lowered the participation barrier, making it easier for educators and students to engage in digital education. The web, social media and blogs all made publishing and sharing a democratized activity. This meant that not only could educators experiment, but that learners were operating in a context where online activity was increasingly the norm. Digital education therefore is not struggling as an unfamiliar concept. Second, they all have elements of control as a central proposition. For the web and social media there is a lessening of control, while the LMS is a means to explicitly regain that control from the “wild web”. MOOCs are an interesting microcosm of this tension, as the early experimental MOOCs (sometimes referred to as cMOOCs) were much more open in terms of pedagogy, community and technology. The later commercial MOOCs (also known as xMOOCs) are delivered in a much more uniform, linear, controlled manner. Lastly, the combination of these two features – ease of use and control – lead to reflections on openness.

At the start of this chapter eight areas of open education were proposed. The five educational technologies presented here map much of this trajectory. The web was crucial in the transformation of much of distance learning into e-learning, which led to the LMS. Blogs and social media have informed open practice, which was a driving factor for OER and MOOCs. It is a mistake to see open education as synonymous with only one of these eight sub-topics, just as it is also not synonymous with digital education. However digital education and open education are intricately entwined. Digital technologies give rise to development in education which seeks to explore aspects of the openness these technologies afford. The practices developed in open education themselves then go on to influence the development of further technologies. It is through this lens of iterative influence that we can best consider future developments in open education.

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Weller, M. (2022). The Rise and Development of Digital Education. In: Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0351-9_5-1

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What is the Digital Education Action Plan?

The Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027) is a renewed European Union (EU) policy initiative that sets out a common vision of high-quality, inclusive and accessible digital education in Europe, and aims to support the adaptation of the education and training systems of Member States to the digital age.

The Action Plan, adopted on 30 September 2020, is a call for greater cooperation at European level on digital education to address the challenges and opportunities of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to present opportunities for the education and training community (teachers, students), policy makers, academia and researchers on national, EU and international level.

The initiative contributes to the Commission’s priority ‘ A Europe fit for the Digital Age ’ and to Next Generation EU . It also supports the Recovery and Resilience Facility , which aims to create a greener, more digital and resilient European Union.

The Digital Education Action Plan is a key enabler to realising the vision of achieving a European Education Area by 2025. It contributes to achieving the goals of the European Skills Agenda , the European Social Pillar Action Plan and the ‘ 2030 Digital Compass: the European way for the Digital Decade ’.

To inform the proposal, from July to September 2020, the Commission launched an open public consultation to gather the views and experiences of all citizens, institutions and organisations.

The actions of the Digital Education Action Plan

The Digital Education Plan sets out two strategic priorities and fourteen actions to support them:

Priority 1: Fostering the development of a high-performing digital education ecosystem

What will the European Commission do to achieve this?

• Action 1: Council recommendation on the key enabling factors for successful digital education and training
• Action 2 : Council Recommendation on blended learning approaches for high-quality and inclusive primary and secondary education
• Action 3 : European Digital Education Content Framework
• Action 4 : Connectivity and digital equipment for education and training
• Action 5 : Digital transformation plans for education and training institutions
• Action 6 : Ethical guidelines on the use of AI and data in teaching and learning for educators

Priority 2: Enhancing digital skills and competences for the digital transformation

• Action 7 : Common guidelines for teachers and educators to foster digital literacy and tackle disinformation through education and training
• Action 8 : Updating the European Digital Competence Framework to include AI and data-related skills
• Action 9 : European Digital Skills Certificate (EDSC)
• Action 10 : Council recommendation on improving the provision of digital skills in education and training
• Action 11 : Cross-national collection of data and an EU-level target on student digital skills
• Action 12 : Digital Opportunity Traineeships
• Action 13 : Women’s participation in STEM
• European Digital Education Hub

The European Digital Education Hub

To support both priority areas, the Commission will also establish a European Digital Education Hub strengthening cooperation and exchange in digital education at the EU level.

Why is action needed?

Digital transformation has changed society and the economy with an ever deepening impact on everyday life, and demonstrated the need for higher levels of digital capacity of education and training systems and institutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the existing trend towards online and hybrid learning. It uncovered new and innovative ways for students and educators to organise their teaching and learning activities and to interact in a more personal and flexible manner online. In parallel, the uptake of digital technologies for education revealed challenges and inequalities between those who have access to digital technologies and those who do not (including individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds); and challenges related to the digital capacities of education and training institutions, teacher training and overall levels of digital skills and competences.

These changes called for a strong and coordinated effort at the EU level to support education and training systems to address the challenges identified and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, while putting forward a long-term vision for the way ahead for European digital education.

The figures also speak for themselves:

• a 2018 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study found that on average less than 40% of educators across the EU felt ready to use digital technologies in teaching, with divergences between EU Member States
• more than one third of 13-14 year olds who participated in the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) in 2018 did not possess the most basic proficiency level in digital skills
• a quarter of low-income households have no access to computers and broadband, with divergences across the EU affected by household income ( Eurostat , 2019)
• 95% of the respondents of the Open Public Consultation of the Digital Education Action Plan consider that the COVID-19 pandemic marks a turning point for how technology is used in education and training (Digital Education Action Plan, Open Public Consultation , 2020)

First Digital Education Action Plan

The Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027) builds on the first Digital Education Action Plan (2018-2020).

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Student Spotlights

Rethinking digital education in a ‘global classroom’.

A Q&A with Sidharth Chauhan LL.M. ’21

As Harvard Law students across the world logged onto Zoom this fall to connect to their professors and peers, Sidharth Chauhan LL.M. ’21 took virtual education a step further. On top of his studies and his roles as a class marshal, board member of the HLS Antitrust Association, and member of South Asian Law Students Association, he also worked on a global program  for exploring digital transformation during a pandemic. The program focused specifically on pressing issues around education in a digital context. 

The topic hits close to home for Chauhan, who last year coordinated efforts to encourage masks and help young students access information and courses online in his hometown of Kotkhai in the Himalayas. 

The three month program — a “research sprint” — hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (in collaboration with the Network of Centers ) convened 39 participants from 21 countries to collaborate and engage with experts on topics ranging from digital well-being, inequities in access and skills, and the future of education. Chauhan participated as a student in the program, as well as a research assistant summarizing discussions for the program’s final report , and preparing a literature database of resources for participants.    

“We launched this research sprint out of a dire need to understand and rethink the state of digital education today,” said Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 , professor of practice at HLS, executive director of the Berkman Klein Center, and co-leader of the program. “COVID underscores major issues and challenges with digital learning, but also provides an opportunity for us to (virtually) come together to reimagine what a more inclusive and equitable future of digital education could look like, and how we might get there. Our research sprint participants from around the world helped us with early conceptions of the challenges — and potential pathways — in digital learning.” 

We spoke with Chauhan about his time working with the Berkman Klein Center, how his legal perspective shaped his experience, and how the program informed his thinking going forward. 

Harvard Law Today: What motivated you to join the research sprint at the Berkman Klein Center?

Sidharth Chauhan: During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in India in early 2020, I started the ‘ Project Care-ona ’ as a crowd-funded initiative for spreading COVID-19 related health and safety awareness in the much-neglected remote rural hill communities in India. A part of this initiative is to undertake skill-enhancement drives for schoolteachers in the State of Himachal Pradesh in an effort to propagate low-cost low-bandwidth virtual classrooms.

When I read about the research sprint, I saw this as an opportunity to learn from the global community about the ethical, societal, and policy challenges posed by COVID-19 and share my experiences of my initiative and challenges faced by people in the Himalayan region of my country.

In addition, being an antitrust and law and technology enthusiast, I have always found the work done by Berkman Klein Center very fascinating and wanted to experience it first-hand.

HLT: The program convened sessions with students and experts from all around the world. What was that experience like?

Chauhan: We were a global community of approximately 40 student participants and 33 experts from different countries spread over five continents in the program. I had a wonderful experience engaging with and learning from leading experts in the field of digital technology, education, policy, and ethics. Working with different student groups and being a part of an interdisciplinary research team improved my research and collaboration skills. And I was able to make meaningful connections, even though virtually.

The world is indeed a small place because when I heard about issues and challenges posed by the pandemic from students and experts, I was able to relate it to my country and realized how similar or related our issues were! And collectively, we can prepare ourselves better for the next crisis.

HLT: You worked in collaboration with students and Berkman Klein staff on a report entitled “ Digital Ethics in Times of Crisis: COVID-19 and Access to Education and Learning Spaces ,” which is aimed at conveying key themes from the program to policymakers and other decision makers. What do you hope readers of the report take away from it?

Chauhan: Our work product is the result of an iterative co-creation process among student participants, program staff, and experts and their diverse voices. The voices and needs of youth in learning environments are often missing. However, through this research sprint, we created a truly “global classroom.” We engaged in difficult ethical and other questions of digital transformation among one another and with practitioners, scholars, designers, policy-makers, and industry leaders.

Awareness is key. The map of the relevant issues and corresponding questions will spark many discussions and I hope the readers will engage in fruitful conversations and make people around them aware of the opportunities and challenges brought by the digital transformation.

HLT: What impact do you hope it will have?

Chauhan: Our work product will be a great reference point for policy-makers/stakeholders as we have outlined the relevant issues and corresponding questions that policy-makers around the globe need to address in order to harness the benefits of digital technologies while avoiding some of the possible downsides during the current crisis. Since a global cohort participated in the program, it brings together many diverse voices, which has made the work output very impactful.

HLT: What was the most interesting topic you explored during the program?

Chauhan: We covered a diverse number of topics such as privacy, surveillance, social and emotional wellbeing of learners, ethnic and racial disparities, etc. The most interesting topic I explored during the program was the need to invest in low-tech/no-tech initiatives for marginalized communities as this would minimize the impact on learning due to COVID-19. It was interesting to learn how the educational system has tried to adapt and implement creative ways to teach, like using radio broadcasting and public national TV to disseminate educational content.

I grew up in a small Himalayan town, which lacks a robust digital infrastructure. Hence, I was very keen on learning about low-tech/no-tech initiatives so that I could share my knowledge about the best practices employed around the world with my community.

HLT: How did your studies as an LL.M. student — and your interests in tech and the law — inform or shape your perception of the program?

Chauhan: At HLS, I am focusing on corporate law, antitrust, and law and technology. I was able to apply the interdisciplinary research skills learnt at the Law School. The highly collaborative approach of the program was a unique opportunity to participate in hands-on research activities on various pressing issues and with real-world impact. Due to my interests in tech and the law, I was able to add value to discussions on data privacy, surveillance, and data governance.

HLT: How did participating in the research sprint inform your time at HLS and your future trajectory?

Chauhan: Currently, I am taking Professor Urs Gasser’s class on Comparative Digital Privacy . I have been able to relate issues I learned during the research sprint with what I am learning in class. This has been really fascinating!

India is a fast-growing economy, yet the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is growing deeper and wider. The pace of economic and technological advancements is not in sync with social welfare issues. While technology is slowly seeping into the finer fabric of Indian society and is bringing multiple benefits of speed and interconnectivity, it is also exposing people to various digital threats, most of which are still not well understood. I want to learn from the best practices of the other countries to see how Indian laws need to be updated with the changing times. Learning from a global cohort in the research sprint was a step towards expanding my knowledge.

As an aspiring case officer with the Competition Commission of India, I wish to be at the forefront of ensuring that the laws of the land are sufficiently armed to battle the unseen and obscure threats of digitalization, while not stultifying the positive impacts that digitalization will undoubtedly have on society.

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Digital vs Traditional: How Digital Education Is Changing the Educational Landscape

ALI Research Staff | Published  July 21, 2023 | Updated December 14, 2023

Schools and institutions everywhere experienced an abrupt transformation due to the global pandemic as they quickly adapted to remote learning environments.

This fundamental paradigm shift cleared the path for the emerging trend of digital education, which has permanently changed how students learn and teachers teach.

Giving kids the necessary 21st-century skills and digital literacy has become crucial in this brave new world.

Introduction

The integration of technology into classrooms is not new.

The COVID-19 crisis merely served as a catalyst that brought digital learning to the fore of discussions about education.

As the pandemic spread, educators and decision-makers understood the pressing need to close the digital divide and adopt cutting-edge approaches to guarantee continuity in education.

As a result, digital education emerged as a crucial lifeline that allowed students to continue their academic careers despite the logistical limitations imposed by the lockdown.

The importance of teaching 21st-century skills and digital literacy to today's pupils must be understood in the context of this disruptive wave.

The capacity to use digital tools, critically evaluate information, communicate across virtual platforms, and adapt to constantly changing technical environments has become a necessity for future success in an increasingly interconnected and technology-driven society.

By giving students these fundamental skills, we enable them to thrive in the digital age and participate fully in a society that is interconnected on a worldwide scale.

However, many have expressed concerns about the growth of the digital education ecosystem. The focus on experiential learning and in-person communication in traditional schooling has long helped to build a feeling of community and facilitate tactile learning.

There is a legitimate concern that an over-reliance on the virtual world might restrict social contacts, hamper the development of specific practical skills, and have other possible negative effects.

It is crucial to address these issues as we investigate this new territory and strike a delicate balance between utilizing digital education's advantages and retaining the core principles of holistic learning.

Here we explore in detail the emerging trend of digital learning . We examine the value of educating students in digital literacy and 21st-century skills while also addressing worries about the practical application of digital learning and its possible downsides.

By focusing on these important elements, we can help educators, administrators, and policy-makers create an environment for digital education that is efficient and inclusive while also highlighting the potential and difficulties that lie ahead.

What is a Digital Curriculum? 

Broadly speaking, a digital curriculum is one that uses technology to provide educational resources.

These might be student-facing and could include multimedia materials, virtual simulations, interactive web resources, and adaptable learning tools.

Teacher-facing resources allow educators to leverage technology and web-based tools to select and adapt student resources, monitor and assess progress, analyze data for decision-making, and communicate with students, parents, and other stakeholders in real time.

The versatility and scalability of a digital curriculum provide customized learning opportunities.

Students have 24/7 access to digital textbooks, workbooks, and study materials. Podcasts, films, and other multimedia content improve engagement .

Virtual simulations offer a practical application of skills and knowledge. Adaptive learning technologies track students' progress and provide tailored feedback while customizing lessons to their requirements.

Additionally, diverse learning styles can be accommodated by a digital curriculum, enabling differentiation in the classroom.

Students are given the freedom to learn at their own speed and explore subjects in a variety of ways thanks to the seamless integration of technology.

Overcoming the Digital Divide

The digital divide continues to represent a serious challenge to equal access to technology in education.

Efforts include giving underserved communities access to technology and the Internet.

Programs exist to address this by providing free laptops and setting up public Wi-Fi networks, creating a more inclusive digital environment.

Remote and underserved students can access top-notch educational information thanks to online platforms and virtual classrooms, which transcend geographic boundaries.

Utilizing digital tools promotes an egalitarian environment where all kids can succeed.

Although there has been progress, there is still a long way to go in closing the gap. To guarantee that every student has access to digital education, cooperation between governments, educational and corporate institutions, and communities is essential.

By pursuing equal access, we unleash the revolutionary potential of technology and pave the way for a world where everyone has access to the best educational opportunities.

Benefits of Digital Education Over Traditional Education

Students gain from digital education's improved accessibility, flexibility, and convenience.

Engagement and results are optimized via personalized instruction, adaptive assessments, and quick feedback. It fosters 21st-century skills, including problem-solving , collaboration , critical thinking , and digital literacy .

Sharing resources among teachers makes it easier for them to collaborate. Delivery through several channels accommodates various learning styles, encouraging inclusion. 

Teachers and parents benefit from digital platforms that break down barriers to communication and involvement. Tools for data analysis enable instructors to make wise choices, increasing motivation and accountability. 

Challenges of Digital Learning: Striking a Balance

Although there are many advantages to digital education, we need to acknowledge the unique challenges it creates.

One challenge frequently discussed is the loss of hands-on experiences and face-to-face encounters that can affect how some abilities are developed and make it more difficult to create social connections.

It is, therefore, essential to incorporate practical hands-on elements into any digital curriculum.

Students should get the chance to participate in hands-on investigations and real-world applications as well as through virtual labs and simulations. 

To reduce this, parents, schools, and others must work together to create standards for responsible screen use.

Digital platforms should also include tools and functions that encourage focus and reduce distractions so that students may continue to be engaged and productive.

Additionally, it is crucial to track and assess the success of digital education. Evaluation should be used often to ensure that children are learning the relevant knowledge and skills.

To continuously improve the digital learning experience and address any issues or restrictions that may come up, it is equally crucial to get feedback from both students and teachers.

Will Digital Education Take Over Traditional Education Completely?

Learning has been forever transformed by digital education, but will it ever entirely replace traditional education? The short and simple answer is ‘no.’

The longer and more complicated answer requires that we examine the advantages of both strategies.

Accessibility, interactivity, engagement, and individualized, adaptive learning are all features of digital education.

It provides students with resources that encourage 21st-century capabilities and the skills they will need in an increasingly technological world.

At the same time, traditional teaching methods with hands-on activities and face-to-face interactions promote the development of soft skills, including interpersonal skills, that can only be developed through in-person classroom experiences.

The unique benefits of both traditional and digital approaches to teaching and learning suggest that the optimal strategy is the seamless incorporation of digital technologies in conventional classrooms as opposed to their total replacement. 

Finding a balance is crucial. Different subjects and learning objectives could call for different strategies. It's crucial to customize based on students' needs.

A comprehensive and successful learning experience can be obtained by combining the advantages of traditional and digital education.

Despite the impressive advances made by digital education, it is unlikely to displace traditional education completely. The use of digital technologies in conventional classrooms enables a cohesive approach.

A thorough and enjoyable learning experience is guaranteed by striking a balance depending on educational goals and situations.

Looking Ahead

Although it has changed the educational environment, traditional education will still exist alongside digital education. Both strategies offer various advantages. The trick is incorporating digital technologies into conventional classes.

A balance must be struck. An interesting learning experience is ensured by customization based on student needs. Results are maximized when digital and conventional schooling are combined.

Exploring digital integration, acquiring digital literacy, limiting screen time, and dealing with distractions are all ongoing tasks for STEM educators. Collaboration and ongoing research are crucial.

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Understanding digital education – learning in the 21st century.

In the fast-changing India of the 21st century, digital education stands out as a revolutionary idea that could change the way people learn. Digital education very simply refers to the use of technology in education as it uses digital tools, online platforms, and interactive content to give everyone access to high-quality education, bridge geographical gaps, and raise a generation with a wide range of skills for a globally connected world. 

This is made possible by the rapid spread of technology and internet connectivity. This new way of teaching and learning can change the way people learn, create more personalized learning experiences, and make India’s education system more open and flexible for its many different people.

What’s driving this?

The sole driver of this era of Digital Education is the advancement we’ve seen in Technology. It is becoming a more and more important part of schooling today. Technology is being used to make education more available, engaging, and personal.

Technology is changing education in a lot of ways, but one of the most important is that it makes education easily available to all. Online learning systems let students get to their assignments and learning materials from anywhere with an internet connection. This is very important for students who live in rural places or have trouble going to regular schools. 

For places that are at the remotest corners of our country, there are solutions now in the market using which students can access the same learning content and resources that were there in the online solutions, without an internet connection, i.e. offline. 

The digital era of education is undoubtedly making it more engaging and interesting for students to understand, interpret, and register the learnings more efficiently and effectively. Further, with these innovations, the scope of gaining and practicing one’s knowledge is getting wider. 

This blog post will talk about the concept of Digital Education and how it is shaping learning at schools and home in the 21st century.

Just to be clear and to ensure that we are all on the same page, let’s first define Digital Education

What is digital education?

Digital education is the incorporation and use of various digital technologies and tools in the educational environment to improve the learning experience and outcomes. It employs digital devices, software applications, and interactive content to facilitate the instructing and learning process. This strategy utilizes the capabilities of digital tools to make learning more engaging, individualized, and efficient.

Digital Education predominantly entails the use of smart classrooms, tablet-based digital libraries, learning tablets, and mobile applications related to education. The purpose of these tools is to provide students with access to a vast assortment of educational resources, interactive content, and activities that go beyond traditional textbooks and classroom instruction.

But where did this concept of digital education emerge from? It is all an outcome of the digital revolution we have witnessed in the 21st century. How is that? Let’s unfold that going further in this blog post. 

The Digital Revolution and Its Impact on Education

In the dynamic environment of the twenty-first century, the convergence of technology and education has given birth to the phenomenon known as Digital Education. This paradigm shift represents a departure from traditional teaching methods in preference for a novel approach that capitalizes on the power of digital tools and technologies. Let’s investigate the profound impact that the digital revolution has had on education and how it has changed the way we teach and learn.

Creatively Fostering Learning

The digital revolution has ushered in a new era of educational innovation, transforming traditional classrooms into dynamic, interactive learning environments. The core of this transformation is the seamless integration of digital devices, software applications, and interactive content. These digital tools exceed the limitations of traditional instruction by offering students a more engaging, personalized, and effective learning experience. Digital Education brings learning materials to life by rendering them into interactive experiences that capture students’ attention and promote deeper comprehension. All that while it is simultaneously recording everything in real-time. 

The Power of Smart Classrooms Unlocked

Smart classrooms, which have supplemented traditional chalkboards with interactive flat panels, digital whiteboards, or smart TVs loaded with textbooks and multimedia-rich content, are at the forefront of the digital education revolution. Through engaging real-life connection animations, practice with instant feedback, notes, and assessments these technological marvels allow teachers to bring complex concepts to life. 

Similarly, iPrep Digital Class comes with a rich and comprehensive collection of digital learning content and holistic growth content for students to learn and grow unlimited. The best part is that the content runs completely offline and comes with a real-time usage monitoring system that gives us classroom-wise usage reports for a data-driven approach to teaching and learning. 

The real-time engagement of students in these immersive environments promotes a deeper understanding of subjects, transforming classroom teaching and learning into an active and collaborative endeavor.

The use of Digital Libraries in schools

The digital revolution has also given rise to digital libraries or ICT Labs based on computers, laptops, tablets, or other similar devices like Android Notebooks, Chromebooks, or Primebooks, that offer students a vast repository of educational resources. These devices are loaded with digital content like multimedia, textbooks, assessments, etc. that are suited to a variety of learning styles. At the same time, these are easy to set up, maintain, and use. 

A perfect example of what we just mentioned is the iPrep Digital Library which is a tablet-based smart ICT Lab solution with digital learning content for classes 1st to 12th all subjects. The devices are a rich and comprehensive collection of digital learning content and holistic growth content for students to learn and grow unlimited. The best part is that these come with a real-time usage monitoring system that gives us student-wise usage reports for a data-driven approach to learning in classrooms. 

Based on various research , the concept of ICT in education has been linked to an improvement in people’s lives by improving teaching and learning outcomes. And with tablet-based smart ICT labs, we take the experience of ICT to another level. 

This approach can result in improved and personalized learning experiences for students, enhanced access to educational resources, streamlined classroom management, and data-driven insights to optimize their learning outcomes.

Personalizing the Educational Process

Personalization of learning requirements is arguably the most important aspect of digital education. Teachers with the help of the new-age digital learning solutions can personalize learning paths with the aid of digital tools, adapting content and pace to meet the needs, learning capabilities, learning levels, and interests of each student. This individualized approach guarantees that no student falls behind, fostering a sense of accomplishment and motivation.

A similar approach can be found in a Personalised adaptive learning solution called the iPrep PAL which is an enjoyable & personalized adaptive learning solution on tablets, notebooks, and mobile for classes 3rd to 12th all subjects in both English and Hindi medium. 

It offers diagnostic tests for all chapters followed by a personalized learning path for every student based on their current learning levels. A combination of Practice Questions with feedback and remedial video content guides the students to cover their historical learning gaps and master every topic to achieve grade-level learning outcomes. 

The integration of digital solutions into education in this manner, enabling personalized learning paths based on individual learning levels, capabilities, and interests, can lead to enhanced student engagement, better academic outcomes, and a greater sense of achievement.

Benefits of Digital Education in the 21st Century

There are several benefits of digital education in the 21st century, let us give you the 7 most prominent ones

Benefit 1: Access to high-quality learning resources

Through technology, online platforms, and interactive content, digital education provides access to high-quality educational resources. Particularly benefited are people living in remote or underserved areas without access to traditional educational institutions. Students can gain access to up-to-date resources and learn at their own pace and according to their own learning level, style, and pace without breaking a sweat. 

This access is exactly what we aim to spread with our digital learning solutions equipped with the one-stop learning platform iPrep. 

Benefit 2: Personalized Learning

A key benefit of digital education is its ability to personalize learning. Adaptable digital tools can accommodate individual learning styles, paces, and preferences. The result is students progress at their own pace, focusing on areas they find challenging, and receiving content that is tailored to their specific needs, resulting in improved comprehension and retention.

The personalized adaptive learning solution called iPrep PAL seamlessly creates personalized and tailored learning paths for students based on their current learning levels and understanding of the chapters and subjects. That helps students overcome the areas they find challenging by adaptively eradicating their historical learning gaps over all subjects and chapters. 

Benefit 3: Flexibility and Convenience

The benefits of digital education include flexibility and convenience. With an internet connection, students can access learning materials and resources at any time and from anywhere. This flexibility is especially valuable for students with busy schedules, or those who prefer learning at their own pace.

iPrep’s digital learning solutions go one step ahead in providing flexibility and convenience. The learning tablets solution called iPrep Tablets comes with an entire set of rich and comprehensive learning content and holistic development content present on the iPrep Platform preloaded on the tablets with the help of SD cards. That allows students to access the entire curriculum without the need of an internet connection making it much more convenient and flexible.

Benefit 4: Interactive and Engaging Learning Outcomes

Learners are more engaged and interactive when they use digital tools. Students can grasp complex concepts more easily through interactive lessons, animations, MCQ-based practice, and multimedia elements. In addition to increasing motivation and participation, such a dynamic learning environment can lead to a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

The learning platform “iPrep” is filled with highly interactive and engaging learning resources including Animated video lessons, MCq-based practice with instant feedback, Syllabus books, class notes for easy revision, a Rich collection of digital books in the books library, lab practicals; videos, and Interactive lessons with DIY activities and life lessons. Altogether, it makes the learning outcomes more engaging and interactive. 

Benefit 5: Data-Driven Insights Of Teaching and Learning

Data on student performance, progress, and engagement is often collected by digital education platforms. Individual and class performance can be analyzed using this data. That makes it possible for teachers and Teachers to identify areas for improvement, learning gaps, and areas of strength. With this data-driven approach, it is possible to make more informed instructional decisions and to develop targeted interventions that support student learning.

Each of iPrep’s digital learning solutions, whether it is a smart class, digital library, learning tablet, learning app, or PAL app, comes with a real-time progress-tracking feature. It tracks the usage of the learning platform iPrep at every point of interaction and one can very easily access these usage reports within the My Reports section. These usage reports automatically sync to our central reporting dashboard called the iPrep Reporting Dashboard once the devices are connected to the internet. Making remote access to the usage reports seamlessly possible.

Benefit 6: Holistic Approach To Education

Digital education facilitates a holistic approach to learning by providing a vast array of resources beyond traditional textbooks. It incorporates a variety of learning resources, including multimedia content, interactive lessons, videos, and real-time assessments. This multifaceted approach caters to the diverse strengths and preferences of individual students by addressing various learning styles and intelligences. 

As a result, students can develop a well-rounded comprehension of subjects while also cultivating creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and application of knowledge in the real world. This comprehensive approach prepares students for the complexities of the contemporary world, where multidimensional skills are crucial for success.

This holistic approach is also present in each of iPrep’s digital Education-related solutions. We firmly believe that taking care of the learning part is not enough for students’ individual betterment and growth. Therefore, together with iPrep’s digital learning content, we also provide holistic growth content including a rich book library with books on personal growth, stories & picture books, inspiring biographies, and interactive lessons for holistic learning and growth.

We have seen great results out of this just like the story of Nisha , a girl who loves to read books and was able to pursue her passion for reading with the Books library. Also, a girl named Meenal from Himachal Pradesh got the 1st prize in District level science exhibition as she made working models by watching the DIY project videos that are a part of the Interactive lessons on iPrep.

Benefit 7: Enhanced Learning Outcomes

Last but one of the most obvious outcomes of Digital Education is Enhanced Learning Outcomes. Digital education has the potential to significantly improve the learning outcomes of students. With the aid of digital tools, teachers can create and employ innovative teaching strategies that resonate with the tech-savvy students of today. Not only do interactive content, animations, and real-time assessments captivate students’ attention, but they also promote active participation and deeper comprehension.

The ability to track progress, identify areas for refinement, and provide timely feedback contributes further to enhanced learning outcomes. As students engage more profoundly with the content and develop a stronger grasp of concepts, their overall academic performance and retention of knowledge are likely to improve, fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth.

iPrep’s Digital Learning solutions are well-equipped to deliver enhanced learning outcomes in both schools and at home. The usage reports we receive on the iPrep reporting dashboard from thousands of schools in 20 different states of our country evidently show how our solutions have helped both teaching and learning go beyond the normal and achieve great heights. 

In short, Digital Education can be highly beneficial for both teachers and students as a whole there are also some challenges and limitations that come with the idea of implementing Digital Learning Solutions across our nation India. Let’s together explore those challenges and see what can be done to overcome them

Challenges for Implementing Digital Education

Challenge 1: connectivity gap.

There are still significant disparities in internet connectivity and access to technology, despite the potential for digital education to reach remote and underserved areas. Numerous students and schools, particularly in rural and economically disadvantaged areas, lack dependable internet access for digital education. For some places, even mobile connectivity signals are unseen privileges. 

But we can eradicate this challenge. As we mentioned earlier, iPrep’s digital learning solutions work seamlessly without an internet connection which very well takes away the sheer requirement of an internet connection for students to access high-quality learning resources. 

Challenge 2: The Infrastructural Reliability of Technology

Digital education relies extensively on technological infrastructure, such as stable Internet connections and functional devices. However, technical errors, connectivity problems, power disruptions, and hardware limitations can impede the learning process and frustrate both students and teachers.

Inadequate infrastructure can undermine the efficacy of digital education initiatives, causing learning interruptions and impeding the delivery of educational content in a seamless manner.

This challenge too is quite easy to overcome when our digital learning solutions come into play. As we already mentioned, iPrep’s digital learning solutions do not require an internet connection,  technical errors, inadequate infrastructure, and power disruptions are also the issues we take care of with our solutions. How? Let’s have a look- 

• Technical Errors: We have a dedicated customer support team to take care of and resolve all the technical and other errors that our users may face while using our digital learning solutions either remotely or by visiting the location of implementation.
• Inadequate infrastructure- Our digital learning solutions are so easy to implement that inadequate infrastructure is never a barrier, So much so that we have also implemented our solutions even i n Tin Shed schools. 
• Power disruptions: The digital library solution called the iPrep Digital Library comes with a charging trolley that charges the entire set of tablets with just one single source and once changed these devices run for at least 8 to 10 hours which is equal to a school’s timing. This further ensures that no power disruptions can take away the joy of Digital learning and growth from students at school. 

Challenge 3: Teacher Training and Digital Literacy

Integrating digital tools and platforms into education necessitates that Teachers have a solid foundation in digital literacy and the skills necessary to utilize these tools effectively. Many Teachers may lack the necessary training to optimally utilize technology in the classroom.

Inadequate teacher training and digital literacy may result in suboptimal use of digital tools, thereby limiting the potential for interactive and engaging learning experiences. Teachers may struggle to adapt their teaching methods to the digital environment in the absence of appropriate guidance.

This is why with each of iPrep’s classroom-based Digital Education solutions including iPrep Digital Class for Smart Classes and iPrep Digital Library for Tablet-based smart ICT Labs, we give thorough and in-depth training to the teachers on the usage of these solutions at the time we implement these solutions in their schools. These trainings ensure that teachers have a complete and thorough idea of how to use these solutions to best deliver the expected teaching and learning outcomes. We also convey that our dedicated support team is always there to help them if they ever encounter an issue while using iPrep’s solutions. 

Challenge 4: Privacy and Safety Issues

Digital education necessitates the accumulation and sharing of student data via online platforms and applications. This raises concerns regarding data privacy, security vulnerabilities, and the misuse of personal information, especially in the case of younger learners.

Privacy and security concerns can erode confidence in digital education platforms and hinder their adoption. To ensure the ethical use of technology in education, it is essential to strike a balance between providing personalized learning experiences and safeguarding sensitive data.

This is why we ensure that iPrep’s digital education-related solutions and our learning platform are completely safe and secure for teachers and students to use in schools or at home. How? We incorporate the following practices to make that happen- 

• Encryption & Secure Data Transmission
• Regular Security Audits 
• Penetration Testing
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA
• Data Backup and Disaster Recovery

With this, we ensure that no user or facilitator has to ever be concerned about their privacy and security when using or implementing iPrep’s digital education-related solutions.

Challenge 5: Quality Assurance and Content Curation 

The digital landscape offers an abundance of educational content and resources, but it can be difficult to ensure their quality, accuracy, and relevance. With the proliferation of online platforms and content, it may be difficult for educators and students to differentiate between credible sources and misinformation or low-quality materials.

Without appropriate content curation and quality assurance mechanisms, students may encounter erroneous information or inferior educational content. This can impede effective learning outcomes and diminish the credibility of digital education initiatives. It is essential for successful digital learning experiences that educators have access to high-quality, current, and contextually relevant resources.

To overcome this challenge of implementing digital education, we realized the significance of a strong Quality Control and Content Curation team to uphold the standards of iPrep’s digital learning solutions. We’re committed to iPrep’s digital learning resources and iPrep platform. Our Quality Control team carefully checks instructional information from many sources for correctness, reliability, and alignment with curriculums and educational goals. 

Additionally, our Content Curation team carefully picks accurate, interesting, engaging, and pedagogically effective resources. We actively filter misinformation and poor content using expert inspection. This ensures that iPrep’s digital learning solutions’ material is authentic and relevant for both teachers and students. We are committed to providing a seamless and stimulating digital learning experience that improves learning outcomes and boosts digital education’s reputation with these devoted teams.

To conclude in the landscape of 21st-century India, digital education has emerged as a transformative force, reshaping traditional teaching methods through technology integration. Altogether, smart classrooms and digital libraries have revolutionized learning environments, making education interactive and adaptable. Personalized learning, enabled by digital tools, ensures individual student needs are met, enhancing comprehension and motivation.

Yet, challenges persist. Uneven connectivity and technology access remain hurdles, requiring innovative solutions like offline accessibility. Teacher training, data security, and content quality assurance are crucial for ethical and effective digital education. By addressing these challenges through comprehensive solutions, such as iPrep, India can leverage the potential of digital education, empowering students for a dynamic future, while collaborative efforts ensure its sustainable impact.

Shubh Sharma

Shubh Sharma is a Content Writer, Copy Writer, and SEO Executive at iDream Education.

[email protected]

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#LeadingSDG4 | Education2030

Transforming education with digital learning

Harnessing the power of Digital Learning and Transformation

In the lead up to the Transforming Education Summit (TES) in September 2022, five Thematic Action Tracks were identified to rethink and reimagine the purpose, content and delivery of education, and to transform education for peace, inclusion and sustainability. These Action Tracks serve as key levers to transform education systems — one of these is Digital Learning and Transformation (Action Track 4) .  

Within this thematic track falls the call to action, made during the TES, to ensure and improve quality public digital learning for all, and to ensure that digital platforms empower teachers, learners, and families, support accessibility and sharing of content, and meet the diverse needs of users including learners with disabilities, girls and women, and people on the move. In this call, three keys were identified to unlock the power of digital teaching and learning — content, capacity, and connectivity — making digital teaching and learning more universally accessible and a more reliable pillar of holistic educational experiences.  

Gateways to Public Digital Learning is a global initiative that focuses on the often-overlooked key of digital learning content. It ensures that every learner, teacher, and family can easily access, find, and use high-quality and curriculum-aligned digital education content to advance their learning. One of the key moments of this year’s Digital Learning Week was UNESCO’s update on the strides made in implementing the Gateways to Public Digital Learning Initiative  one year after its launch at the TES.

Country commitments to Digital Learning and Transformation

From UNESCO’s Dashboard of Country Commitments and Actions to Transform Education , it can be seen that Action Track 4 remains as an integral approach for countries to introduce innovation and transformation in their education systems. Out of 143 countries who expressed their national statements of commitment to transform their education systems as a pivotal outcome of the TES, 119 countries — accounting for 83.22 % — have committed against the theme “digital transformation and learning.”  

In particular, countries tackled on their statements of commitments subthemes that fall within Action Track 4:  

digital learning (110 countries) 

connectivity (78 countries) 

digital regulations (14 countries) 

In the second phase of the TES follow-up, a survey was shared with countries so that they can track and monitor their actions against these commitments. Country actions will also be added to the Dashboard in due time. 

Highlights of UNESCO Digital Learning Week 2023

Ensuring that Action Track 4 remains on top of its focus areas, UNESCO held its annual flagship event on Digital Learning and Transformation, the Digital Learning Week , in September 2023, one year after the TES. The Digital Learning Week is a reboot of the Mobile Learning Week, which ran for a decade .  

In its inaugural edition and under the banner of “Steering technology for education,” the Digital Learning Week focused on public digital learning platforms and generative AI (GenAI), examining how both can be steered to reinforce and enrich humanistic education.  

Several countries shared their vision and experiences in advancing Digital Learning and Transformation.  

This initiative will help us to have a shared, collaborative solution to the challenges we have been facing.

We hope to gain opportunities to work closely with other countries that have similar interests; We hope to facilitate some of these conversations about a shared standard that will allow for the resources that are developed to be cross-operable across different platforms.

We really feel the responsibility to join this effort because we’ve been working on trying to address this issue for a long period of time and we needed a lot of partners to actually deal with it;  The challenges ahead are huge, never-ending, so what we are trying to get from this coalition is a different peer group for our students and our teachers, a different conversation in which we can understand better what it looks like to work towards digital sovereignty in education.

Keynote address by Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education

Lecture on Generative AI

Panel attended by Daniel Andler , Mathematician and Philosopher, Member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and Professor Emeritus, Sorbonne Université, France, and Stuart Russell , Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley 

See more UNESCO Digital Learning Week 2023 resources here

First edition of UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week explores frontier technologies for education  

• Digital Learning Week 2023 wrap-up article

An Ed-tech Tragedy? Educational technologies and school closures in the time of COVID-19 (NEW PUBLICATION)

• Publication warning against the overuse of technology. It shares experiences with educational technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications for the future of learning. 

Guidance for generative AI in education and research (NEW PUBLICATION)

• UNESCO’s first-ever global guidance on generative AI in education, which calls on countries to regulate its use. 

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No More No. 2 Pencils: The SAT Goes Fully Digital

The new format cuts nearly an hour out of the exam and has shorter reading passages.

By Dana Goldstein

With adolescent anxiety surging and attention spans challenged, high school students will take a revamped version of the SAT on Saturday, which has been designed in part to reduce stress, according to the College Board, which administers the test.

The exam will be briefer — two hours and 14 minutes instead of three hours — and students will have more time for each question. The reading passages will be much shorter, and test-takers will now be able to use an online graphing calculator for the entire math section of the exam.

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And after 98 years of students scratching answers on paper, the SAT will now be fully digital for the remote-learning generation.

The College Board said its piloting of the exam showed it was just as rigorous as the paper test, but less intimidating for students. And those with A.D.H.D. and dyslexia, as well as those learning English, reported that they were “better able to maintain their focus” on the digital test, compared with the earlier format, said Jaslee Carayol, director of communications for the College Board.

Delivering the test digitally will also reduce the possibility of cheating, the College Board said, because few students will receive the exact same exam. In both reading and math, test-takers who perform well early in the exam will receive harder questions as they go along . (The College Board says scores will be accurate, regardless of the difficulty of questions.)

There are critics, though. The switch to shorter reading passages has not been universally celebrated by English teachers, many of whom believe that in the face of constant distractions from technology, students need to develop greater reading stamina.

The latest overhaul of the exam comes at a fraught moment for the standardized testing industry, in which most colleges have dropped testing requirements.

According to data from Common App , the number of college applicants submitting SAT or ACT scores plummeted from 76 percent in the 2019-2020 admissions cycle to 45 percent this year.

Here’s What It’s Like to Take the New SAT

Students will take a new SAT on Saturday. It’s all digital, and the reading and writing sections do away with page-long reading excerpts with eight to 11 questions.

Even though Yale , Dartmouth and Brown recently made waves by reinstating standardized test requirements, saying the scores are the best predictor of academic success, it is unlikely that most colleges, which are far less selective, will follow suit, said Mary L. Churchill, associate dean at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.

The average acceptance rate among four-year institutions is 73 percent , and most colleges do not face the challenge of having to draw fine-grained distinctions between huge swaths of highly qualified students. Indeed, with some smaller colleges facing under-enrollment and at risk of shutting down, many admissions directors see test-optional policies as a way to encourage more applications, Dr. Churchill said.

Amid this changing landscape, the College Board has successfully promoted the SAT to state policymakers as an integral part of the high school experience, and 16 states now require or encourage students to take the test during the school day, regardless of their plans for life after high school.

In total, 1.9 million students took the SAT in the high school class of 2023, with two-thirds taking the exam during the school day, often for free. In the 2019 class, there were 2.2 million test-takers.

Students will take the exam on an app called Bluebook. In some ways, it tries to recreate the experience of working with paper. There are tools to make highlights and annotations, and to cross out multiple-choice responses students think are wrong.

Test-takers will no longer need to flip back and forth between long reading passages and pages of accompanying questions. Instead, they will tackle a string of much shorter passages — some just one paragraph — each associated with a single question.

Yoon S. Choi, chief executive of CollegeSpring, a nonprofit that provides in-school test prep to low-income students, said the new format was a boon to many, especially English language learners.

But others — including some educators who work with that same population of students — expressed skepticism about the College Board’s revision.

“It seems to me like they are maybe trying to cater to this generation that is doing a lot of reading on the internet, bouncing around from one place to the next,” said Ariel Sacks, a New York City public school English teacher and author of a book arguing for the importance of assigning full novels. “But I don’t think that’s setting a high or even effective expectation for what students should be doing as juniors in high school.”

Ms. Carayol of the College Board acknowledged that reading stamina was important, but said the paper SAT also had not been a good test of that skill.

“Long test passages force students to race through text hunting for answers instead of reading carefully,” she wrote in an email. “There’s a huge benefit for a student by having these shorter passages. If they get uncomfortable or disoriented by a passage, they can skip it and return, rather than having eight to 11 questions tied to each passage.”

At North Houston Early College High School, Adair Rivera, a 17-year-old junior, will take the SAT in the School Day program. He hopes to become the first member of his immediate family to attend college, to study computer science.

Adair said he is earning higher scores on digital practice tests than when he took the paper SAT. He hopes to attend M.I.T. or Yale, which require test scores, or the University of Pennsylvania, which does not.

“It’s a game changer,” he said of the shorter reading passages and shorter exam time. “It doesn’t wear out students as fast.”

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond .

Dana Goldstein covers education and families for The Times.  More about Dana Goldstein

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Grants of up to $75,000 available for innovative digital education initiatives

The provost's DELTA initiative —short for Digital Education and Learning Technology Acceleration—is offering grants of up to $75,000 for students, faculty, and staff seeking funding to develop digital education initiatives with the potential to demonstrably enhance the online and on-campus teaching and learning experience at Johns Hopkins. Since 2018, the Provost's Office has awarded 36 DELTA grants, totaling more than $2.3 million in funding.

In keeping with the university's stated priorities, the Provost's Office is particularly interested in encouraging work that advances cross­-disciplinary and cross­-divisional collaboration, pursues individual and collective excellence, translates knowledge into meaningful impact, and promotes economic opportunity in Baltimore and other communities of which we are a part. The review committee will prioritize proposals that combine innovative digital education initiatives with one or more of these goals.

Proposals are due by May 31 and will be reviewed by the Office of the Provost and a committee composed of representatives from each school. Up to five proposals are expected to be funded in 2024.

"We are excited to continue sponsorship of DELTA to support faculty who are seeking innovative approaches to engage, challenge, and mentor students," said Stephen Gange , professor and executive vice provost. "Each corner of our university brims with creative teaching and transformative learning experiences."

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The SAT is now digital for the first time. One test expert says the new format makes the test easier.

• A new digital SAT is now being offered for the first time. 
• The test is shorter, adaptive, and tests real-world skills.
• One test expert says it's easier than past versions but clarifies it's still not an easy test. 

In March, the first US high school students took the SAT exam — digitally.

This switch to digital comes as many top-tier colleges, such as Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown, are reversing their decision to be exam-optional — a trend that started during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a recent study suggests that test scores actually do predict academic performance and college success — better than high school grades.

Shaan Patel — the founder and CEO of Prep Expert, with more than two decades of experience with the popular college entrance exam — told Business Insider the test will be significantly different than in the past. It may even be easier.

The digital SAT has some content changes

For starters, the digital test will be shorter and adaptive. That means the test will get harder as the student progresses through it, but the level of difficulty will depend on how they performed on earlier questions.

According to Patel, the digital SAT is also more "student-friendly" than previous years.

For example, in the past, there was a section where students couldn't use the calculator, but on the digital SAT, Patel said a calculator could be used on all the questions.

"There's even a digital calculator built into the testing application, in case you don't have a graphing calculator," Patel said.

Related stories

In addition, the reading passages are a lot shorter in the new exam. The essay section has also been dissolved, and the grammar questions have now been integrated with the reading section.

"So it really tests your reading and writing together, which I think will be a welcome change for most people," Patel said.

Plus, there are new question types where students read notes and decipher what is most relevant.

"I think that's a super useful skill in the real world where you get a long email, and you have to sift through the important data," Patel said.

He added students no longer have to memorize difficult, obscure vocabulary words that were once required.

The digital SAT is easier

"The new question types are actually testing students in a much more real-world manner than the previous versions of the SAT," Patel said. "Overall, this test will be more relevant to real-world skills . So, I'm optimistic the changes will be good."

He said, in that regard, the SAT will be easier.

"But, I want to be careful about saying it's easy," Patel said. "I don't think it's easy because what's going to happen is with the adaptive testing structure…you are going to see harder questions as you go along, even though you're going to see fewer questions."

Prep for the SAT shouldn't change all that much

Patel recommended that all students download the College Board's Bluebook app , where they can take practice tests and familiarize themselves with the new adaptive feature.

"They must get used to not letting their brain become overused at the end of the test since that is when most students will encounter the hardest questions," Patel said.

But the most important piece of advice remained the same: prep early.

"I usually recommend getting started in 10th grade so that by the time the fall of 11th grade rolls around, you'll be ready to knock the PSAT out of the park," Patel said, "because the PSAT, especially this new digital PSAT , is more similar to the digital SAT than ever."

Watch: The SAT is getting a massive overhaul — and they’re ditching one of the most annoying parts

• Main content

A generative AI reset: Rewiring to turn potential into value in 2024

It’s time for a generative AI (gen AI) reset. The initial enthusiasm and flurry of activity in 2023 is giving way to second thoughts and recalibrations as companies realize that capturing gen AI’s enormous potential value is harder than expected .

With 2024 shaping up to be the year for gen AI to prove its value, companies should keep in mind the hard lessons learned with digital and AI transformations: competitive advantage comes from building organizational and technological capabilities to broadly innovate, deploy, and improve solutions at scale—in effect, rewiring the business  for distributed digital and AI innovation.

About QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey

QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, helps companies transform using the power of technology, technical expertise, and industry experts. With thousands of practitioners at QuantumBlack (data engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and software engineers) and McKinsey (industry and domain experts), we are working to solve the world’s most important AI challenges. QuantumBlack Labs is our center of technology development and client innovation, which has been driving cutting-edge advancements and developments in AI through locations across the globe.

Companies looking to score early wins with gen AI should move quickly. But those hoping that gen AI offers a shortcut past the tough—and necessary—organizational surgery are likely to meet with disappointing results. Launching pilots is (relatively) easy; getting pilots to scale and create meaningful value is hard because they require a broad set of changes to the way work actually gets done.

Let’s briefly look at what this has meant for one Pacific region telecommunications company. The company hired a chief data and AI officer with a mandate to “enable the organization to create value with data and AI.” The chief data and AI officer worked with the business to develop the strategic vision and implement the road map for the use cases. After a scan of domains (that is, customer journeys or functions) and use case opportunities across the enterprise, leadership prioritized the home-servicing/maintenance domain to pilot and then scale as part of a larger sequencing of initiatives. They targeted, in particular, the development of a gen AI tool to help dispatchers and service operators better predict the types of calls and parts needed when servicing homes.

Leadership put in place cross-functional product teams with shared objectives and incentives to build the gen AI tool. As part of an effort to upskill the entire enterprise to better work with data and gen AI tools, they also set up a data and AI academy, which the dispatchers and service operators enrolled in as part of their training. To provide the technology and data underpinnings for gen AI, the chief data and AI officer also selected a large language model (LLM) and cloud provider that could meet the needs of the domain as well as serve other parts of the enterprise. The chief data and AI officer also oversaw the implementation of a data architecture so that the clean and reliable data (including service histories and inventory databases) needed to build the gen AI tool could be delivered quickly and responsibly.

Creating value beyond the hype

Let’s deliver on the promise of technology from strategy to scale.

Our book Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI (Wiley, June 2023) provides a detailed manual on the six capabilities needed to deliver the kind of broad change that harnesses digital and AI technology. In this article, we will explore how to extend each of those capabilities to implement a successful gen AI program at scale. While recognizing that these are still early days and that there is much more to learn, our experience has shown that breaking open the gen AI opportunity requires companies to rewire how they work in the following ways.

Figure out where gen AI copilots can give you a real competitive advantage

The broad excitement around gen AI and its relative ease of use has led to a burst of experimentation across organizations. Most of these initiatives, however, won’t generate a competitive advantage. One bank, for example, bought tens of thousands of GitHub Copilot licenses, but since it didn’t have a clear sense of how to work with the technology, progress was slow. Another unfocused effort we often see is when companies move to incorporate gen AI into their customer service capabilities. Customer service is a commodity capability, not part of the core business, for most companies. While gen AI might help with productivity in such cases, it won’t create a competitive advantage.

To create competitive advantage, companies should first understand the difference between being a “taker” (a user of available tools, often via APIs and subscription services), a “shaper” (an integrator of available models with proprietary data), and a “maker” (a builder of LLMs). For now, the maker approach is too expensive for most companies, so the sweet spot for businesses is implementing a taker model for productivity improvements while building shaper applications for competitive advantage.

Much of gen AI’s near-term value is closely tied to its ability to help people do their current jobs better. In this way, gen AI tools act as copilots that work side by side with an employee, creating an initial block of code that a developer can adapt, for example, or drafting a requisition order for a new part that a maintenance worker in the field can review and submit (see sidebar “Copilot examples across three generative AI archetypes”). This means companies should be focusing on where copilot technology can have the biggest impact on their priority programs.

Copilot examples across three generative AI archetypes

• “Taker” copilots help real estate customers sift through property options and find the most promising one, write code for a developer, and summarize investor transcripts.
• “Shaper” copilots provide recommendations to sales reps for upselling customers by connecting generative AI tools to customer relationship management systems, financial systems, and customer behavior histories; create virtual assistants to personalize treatments for patients; and recommend solutions for maintenance workers based on historical data.
• “Maker” copilots are foundation models that lab scientists at pharmaceutical companies can use to find and test new and better drugs more quickly.

Some industrial companies, for example, have identified maintenance as a critical domain for their business. Reviewing maintenance reports and spending time with workers on the front lines can help determine where a gen AI copilot could make a big difference, such as in identifying issues with equipment failures quickly and early on. A gen AI copilot can also help identify root causes of truck breakdowns and recommend resolutions much more quickly than usual, as well as act as an ongoing source for best practices or standard operating procedures.

The challenge with copilots is figuring out how to generate revenue from increased productivity. In the case of customer service centers, for example, companies can stop recruiting new agents and use attrition to potentially achieve real financial gains. Defining the plans for how to generate revenue from the increased productivity up front, therefore, is crucial to capturing the value.

Upskill the talent you have but be clear about the gen-AI-specific skills you need

By now, most companies have a decent understanding of the technical gen AI skills they need, such as model fine-tuning, vector database administration, prompt engineering, and context engineering. In many cases, these are skills that you can train your existing workforce to develop. Those with existing AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities have a strong head start. Data engineers, for example, can learn multimodal processing and vector database management, MLOps (ML operations) engineers can extend their skills to LLMOps (LLM operations), and data scientists can develop prompt engineering, bias detection, and fine-tuning skills.

A sample of new generative AI skills needed

The following are examples of new skills needed for the successful deployment of generative AI tools:

• data scientist:
• prompt engineering
• in-context learning
• bias detection
• pattern identification
• reinforcement learning from human feedback
• hyperparameter/large language model fine-tuning; transfer learning
• data engineer:
• data wrangling and data warehousing
• data pipeline construction
• multimodal processing
• vector database management

The learning process can take two to three months to get to a decent level of competence because of the complexities in learning what various LLMs can and can’t do and how best to use them. The coders need to gain experience building software, testing, and validating answers, for example. It took one financial-services company three months to train its best data scientists to a high level of competence. While courses and documentation are available—many LLM providers have boot camps for developers—we have found that the most effective way to build capabilities at scale is through apprenticeship, training people to then train others, and building communities of practitioners. Rotating experts through teams to train others, scheduling regular sessions for people to share learnings, and hosting biweekly documentation review sessions are practices that have proven successful in building communities of practitioners (see sidebar “A sample of new generative AI skills needed”).

It’s important to bear in mind that successful gen AI skills are about more than coding proficiency. Our experience in developing our own gen AI platform, Lilli , showed us that the best gen AI technical talent has design skills to uncover where to focus solutions, contextual understanding to ensure the most relevant and high-quality answers are generated, collaboration skills to work well with knowledge experts (to test and validate answers and develop an appropriate curation approach), strong forensic skills to figure out causes of breakdowns (is the issue the data, the interpretation of the user’s intent, the quality of metadata on embeddings, or something else?), and anticipation skills to conceive of and plan for possible outcomes and to put the right kind of tracking into their code. A pure coder who doesn’t intrinsically have these skills may not be as useful a team member.

While current upskilling is largely based on a “learn on the job” approach, we see a rapid market emerging for people who have learned these skills over the past year. That skill growth is moving quickly. GitHub reported that developers were working on gen AI projects “in big numbers,” and that 65,000 public gen AI projects were created on its platform in 2023—a jump of almost 250 percent over the previous year. If your company is just starting its gen AI journey, you could consider hiring two or three senior engineers who have built a gen AI shaper product for their companies. This could greatly accelerate your efforts.

Form a centralized team to establish standards that enable responsible scaling

To ensure that all parts of the business can scale gen AI capabilities, centralizing competencies is a natural first move. The critical focus for this central team will be to develop and put in place protocols and standards to support scale, ensuring that teams can access models while also minimizing risk and containing costs. The team’s work could include, for example, procuring models and prescribing ways to access them, developing standards for data readiness, setting up approved prompt libraries, and allocating resources.

While developing Lilli, our team had its mind on scale when it created an open plug-in architecture and setting standards for how APIs should function and be built.  They developed standardized tooling and infrastructure where teams could securely experiment and access a GPT LLM , a gateway with preapproved APIs that teams could access, and a self-serve developer portal. Our goal is that this approach, over time, can help shift “Lilli as a product” (that a handful of teams use to build specific solutions) to “Lilli as a platform” (that teams across the enterprise can access to build other products).

For teams developing gen AI solutions, squad composition will be similar to AI teams but with data engineers and data scientists with gen AI experience and more contributors from risk management, compliance, and legal functions. The general idea of staffing squads with resources that are federated from the different expertise areas will not change, but the skill composition of a gen-AI-intensive squad will.

Set up the technology architecture to scale

Building a gen AI model is often relatively straightforward, but making it fully operational at scale is a different matter entirely. We’ve seen engineers build a basic chatbot in a week, but releasing a stable, accurate, and compliant version that scales can take four months. That’s why, our experience shows, the actual model costs may be less than 10 to 15 percent of the total costs of the solution.

Building for scale doesn’t mean building a new technology architecture. But it does mean focusing on a few core decisions that simplify and speed up processes without breaking the bank. Three such decisions stand out:

• Focus on reusing your technology. Reusing code can increase the development speed of gen AI use cases by 30 to 50 percent. One good approach is simply creating a source for approved tools, code, and components. A financial-services company, for example, created a library of production-grade tools, which had been approved by both the security and legal teams, and made them available in a library for teams to use. More important is taking the time to identify and build those capabilities that are common across the most priority use cases. The same financial-services company, for example, identified three components that could be reused for more than 100 identified use cases. By building those first, they were able to generate a significant portion of the code base for all the identified use cases—essentially giving every application a big head start.
• Focus the architecture on enabling efficient connections between gen AI models and internal systems. For gen AI models to work effectively in the shaper archetype, they need access to a business’s data and applications. Advances in integration and orchestration frameworks have significantly reduced the effort required to make those connections. But laying out what those integrations are and how to enable them is critical to ensure these models work efficiently and to avoid the complexity that creates technical debt  (the “tax” a company pays in terms of time and resources needed to redress existing technology issues). Chief information officers and chief technology officers can define reference architectures and integration standards for their organizations. Key elements should include a model hub, which contains trained and approved models that can be provisioned on demand; standard APIs that act as bridges connecting gen AI models to applications or data; and context management and caching, which speed up processing by providing models with relevant information from enterprise data sources.
• Build up your testing and quality assurance capabilities. Our own experience building Lilli taught us to prioritize testing over development. Our team invested in not only developing testing protocols for each stage of development but also aligning the entire team so that, for example, it was clear who specifically needed to sign off on each stage of the process. This slowed down initial development but sped up the overall delivery pace and quality by cutting back on errors and the time needed to fix mistakes.

Ensure data quality and focus on unstructured data to fuel your models

The ability of a business to generate and scale value from gen AI models will depend on how well it takes advantage of its own data. As with technology, targeted upgrades to existing data architecture  are needed to maximize the future strategic benefits of gen AI:

• Be targeted in ramping up your data quality and data augmentation efforts. While data quality has always been an important issue, the scale and scope of data that gen AI models can use—especially unstructured data—has made this issue much more consequential. For this reason, it’s critical to get the data foundations right, from clarifying decision rights to defining clear data processes to establishing taxonomies so models can access the data they need. The companies that do this well tie their data quality and augmentation efforts to the specific AI/gen AI application and use case—you don’t need this data foundation to extend to every corner of the enterprise. This could mean, for example, developing a new data repository for all equipment specifications and reported issues to better support maintenance copilot applications.
• Understand what value is locked into your unstructured data. Most organizations have traditionally focused their data efforts on structured data (values that can be organized in tables, such as prices and features). But the real value from LLMs comes from their ability to work with unstructured data (for example, PowerPoint slides, videos, and text). Companies can map out which unstructured data sources are most valuable and establish metadata tagging standards so models can process the data and teams can find what they need (tagging is particularly important to help companies remove data from models as well, if necessary). Be creative in thinking about data opportunities. Some companies, for example, are interviewing senior employees as they retire and feeding that captured institutional knowledge into an LLM to help improve their copilot performance.
• Optimize to lower costs at scale. There is often as much as a tenfold difference between what companies pay for data and what they could be paying if they optimized their data infrastructure and underlying costs. This issue often stems from companies scaling their proofs of concept without optimizing their data approach. Two costs generally stand out. One is storage costs arising from companies uploading terabytes of data into the cloud and wanting that data available 24/7. In practice, companies rarely need more than 10 percent of their data to have that level of availability, and accessing the rest over a 24- or 48-hour period is a much cheaper option. The other costs relate to computation with models that require on-call access to thousands of processors to run. This is especially the case when companies are building their own models (the maker archetype) but also when they are using pretrained models and running them with their own data and use cases (the shaper archetype). Companies could take a close look at how they can optimize computation costs on cloud platforms—for instance, putting some models in a queue to run when processors aren’t being used (such as when Americans go to bed and consumption of computing services like Netflix decreases) is a much cheaper option.

Build trust and reusability to drive adoption and scale

Because many people have concerns about gen AI, the bar on explaining how these tools work is much higher than for most solutions. People who use the tools want to know how they work, not just what they do. So it’s important to invest extra time and money to build trust by ensuring model accuracy and making it easy to check answers.

One insurance company, for example, created a gen AI tool to help manage claims. As part of the tool, it listed all the guardrails that had been put in place, and for each answer provided a link to the sentence or page of the relevant policy documents. The company also used an LLM to generate many variations of the same question to ensure answer consistency. These steps, among others, were critical to helping end users build trust in the tool.

Part of the training for maintenance teams using a gen AI tool should be to help them understand the limitations of models and how best to get the right answers. That includes teaching workers strategies to get to the best answer as fast as possible by starting with broad questions then narrowing them down. This provides the model with more context, and it also helps remove any bias of the people who might think they know the answer already. Having model interfaces that look and feel the same as existing tools also helps users feel less pressured to learn something new each time a new application is introduced.

Getting to scale means that businesses will need to stop building one-off solutions that are hard to use for other similar use cases. One global energy and materials company, for example, has established ease of reuse as a key requirement for all gen AI models, and has found in early iterations that 50 to 60 percent of its components can be reused. This means setting standards for developing gen AI assets (for example, prompts and context) that can be easily reused for other cases.

While many of the risk issues relating to gen AI are evolutions of discussions that were already brewing—for instance, data privacy, security, bias risk, job displacement, and intellectual property protection—gen AI has greatly expanded that risk landscape. Just 21 percent of companies reporting AI adoption say they have established policies governing employees’ use of gen AI technologies.

Similarly, a set of tests for AI/gen AI solutions should be established to demonstrate that data privacy, debiasing, and intellectual property protection are respected. Some organizations, in fact, are proposing to release models accompanied with documentation that details their performance characteristics. Documenting your decisions and rationales can be particularly helpful in conversations with regulators.

In some ways, this article is premature—so much is changing that we’ll likely have a profoundly different understanding of gen AI and its capabilities in a year’s time. But the core truths of finding value and driving change will still apply. How well companies have learned those lessons may largely determine how successful they’ll be in capturing that value.

The authors wish to thank Michael Chui, Juan Couto, Ben Ellencweig, Josh Gartner, Bryce Hall, Holger Harreis, Phil Hudelson, Suzana Iacob, Sid Kamath, Neerav Kingsland, Kitti Lakner, Robert Levin, Matej Macak, Lapo Mori, Alex Peluffo, Aldo Rosales, Erik Roth, Abdul Wahab Shaikh, and Stephen Xu for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Barr Seitz, an editorial director in the New York office.

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Top Accounting Trends for 2024 and Beyond

• March 19, 2024

The accounting profession is constantly evolving. From new tax laws and innovative technologies to the impact of AI and security breaches, accounting professionals need to stay current to succeed in the field. We reached out to Ricardo Buenrostro, an instructor in UC Davis Continuing and Professional Education’s Accounting Program with over a decade of experience working in finance at UC Davis, for his take on top accounting trends for 2024 and beyond. Here's what he had to say.

1. Digital Transformation and Automation

The increased use of technology and automation in tax processes is a notable trend. Tax professionals leverage advanced software for data analysis, compliance and reporting. Adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning is streamlining routine tasks and allowing professionals to focus on more complex aspects of tax planning.

2. Remote Work and Collaboration Tools

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the acceptance of remote work in various industries, including taxation. Professionals are utilizing virtual collaboration tools, cloud-based platforms and secure communication channels to facilitate remote work and maintain client interactions. This creates a challenging environment for employers and employees alike as they navigate multi-state taxation and potential reciprocity agreements.

3. International Taxation Challenges

International tax regulations are becoming more complex as governments seek to address issues related to base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). Multinational corporations face challenges in navigating the intricate web of international tax laws. Tax professionals need to be well versed in cross-border tax issues.

4. Cryptocurrency Taxation

With the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies, tax authorities are paying more attention to the taxation of digital assets. Professionals need to be knowledgeable about the tax treatment of cryptocurrencies and guide clients in complying with reporting requirements.

5. Data Security and Privacy Concerns

As tax professionals handle sensitive financial information, data security and privacy are paramount. Adhering to cybersecurity best practices and staying informed about data protection regulations is essential to safeguard client information. Tax preparers also must possess a Written Information Security Plan (WISP). This becomes more challenging every year as our digital footprint grows and identity fraud becomes widespread throughout the country.

Stay Current in the Field

Ongoing education can help you stay up to date with current trends. Check out all our available courses today.

6. Green Tax Incentives

Governments are introducing tax incentives to encourage environmentally friendly practices. Tax professionals may need to advise clients on taking advantage of green tax credits and deductions associated with sustainable business activities. Examples of these are the Solar and EV credit iterations we’ve been seeing throughout the years.

7. Increased Scrutiny on Tax Planning Strategies

Tax planning strategies are facing heightened scrutiny from tax authorities. There is a trend toward increased transparency, with regulators focusing on aggressive tax planning practices. Professionals should ensure their strategies align with legal and ethical standards. This can be seen in the recent implementation of the Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reporting requirement.

About the Author

Ricardo Buenrostro works in the UC Davis Finance Department as the director of Tax, Compliance and Controls. He is skilled in tax research, tax preparation, financial aid administration, supervisory management and budget management. Instructor in the Accounting Program at UC Davis CPE.

• Related article: Considering a Career in Accounting? 5 Key Things You Need to Know

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