Education and skills using today's technologies

When it comes to information technology in schools, the valuable experience and views of Nele Leosk, Program Director on ICT in Education, eGovernance Academy, Estonia, are encouraging to hear. She met with Lynda Hawe, Communications Officer for the Directorate for Education and Skills answered a few question about her observations on the use of technology in schools, the benefits for learning, achievement and skills, during a coffee break at the OECD Forum in Paris.

Share with us an example of a successful ICT in Education program that you implemented?
Over the past 15 years Estonia prioritised the development of information society and e-governance and initiated a tiger-leap program. The program focused on teacher training and infrastructure.  In addition, teacher administrators received advanced training on new technologies, so a shift in their mind-set got underway. Technology was not taught separately. Students were taught how to develop and progress in their related subjects by using technology as a complementary support to their learning. Overall, this had a wide impact on Estonian society. The knock on effect of using ICT filtered into homes and attitudes. The program continues - even if currently it has grown from its initial focus.

New technologies can offer many opportunities for education, skills and learning. But do you feel that there is some resistance to the changes technologies bring? 
There is always a natural resistance to what is new, as usually people want to keep the status-quo. Nevertheless, when there are benefits and opportunities linked to change then it will happen. In Estonia, policy makers were strongly behind the strategy to develop and invest in information technology. Now citizens demand it as a prerequisite. But it is a misconception to think that technology alone can enable an improvement in the quality of education received. Overall, it is more a question of teachers’ influence and reactions to the use of technology that is needed to implement change.  Technology is a way to make the teaching process more interactive and fun for students, so that they become more skilled at using it.

Some steps before implementing new technologies: First, have a strategic approach to the teaching necessities of the students, reflecting upon the required teaching frameworks. Secondly, built, buy and install the technologies around the teaching strategy. Lastly, evaluate the results: how have students’ skills been enhanced, what achievements have been made in their learning?

What types of ICT skills do you consider that we should be now teaching in schools, in order to prepare students with the skills they will need for future work environments?
Our main aim, when we started in Estonia, was that students should be able to use technology for their benefit and for their future careers.  Now since 2012, we have re-introduced teaching programme-coding skills.  The skill of information knowledge management is essential: learning how to search the web accurately, evaluating the quality of web-research findings, knowing which sources are relevant and irrelevant. This skill ought to be taught systematically - as it offers vast benefits to all students.

Ethics on the internets should also be taught. Students do not always realise the threats and dangers of the internet, so teaching the skills of how to protect themselves and their privacy online deems necessary. While the students today consider that sharing intimate details online as not being a problem, however, they should realise that in certain situations it can have negative fall-back effects. The dangers of cyber-bullying should also be cautioned.  Consequently, teaching them that the basic principles of good behaviour should follow what is acceptable both offline and online.

In 2012 the Paris Open Educational Resources (OER) Declaration was signed by many countries. Do you think that it will have an impact on the future of ICT Education?
The sharing of teaching materials online is an upright initiate. The OER declaration is a positive step in the right direction. Technological advances facilitate the production, distribution and use of OER and novel and more flexible licensing schemes, such as Creative Commons, give authors and institutions opportunities. Ideally all students should have free access to both the print and e-books on their learning curriculum. Policy makers have an important role to play in promoting progress in this area.  Previously in Estonia, some teachers had difficulties finding appropriate materials so the online attitude of sharing teaching materials is a praiseworthy approach. Teacher generated materials is also a good way for teachers to improve their own skills.

Kids these days use social media constantly, how to you think it affects their learning skills and educational outcomes?
Social media sometimes has a negative effect on students’ concentration. So the banning of mobile devises in certain classroom situations seems reasonable. Online video games can be creative, entertaining and help develop good ICT skills, yet the risks and dangers of playing violent games should be voiced, as they can have destructive influences on young minds. For that reason, preventive and awareness knowledge about social, ethical and healthy online usage should be shared with both students, teachers and parents, as well as establishing solid best practices.

LINKS:

E-Governance Academy, Estonia

Tiger-Leap, Estonia

E-Governance Academy, Estonia

Connected Minds: Technology and Today's Learners

Inspired by Technology, Driven by Pedagogy

Are the New Millennium Learners Making the Grade?

UNESCO – ICT in Education

Paris OER Declaration

Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) - Open Educational Resources (OER)
Photo credit: Pupils In Class Using Digital Tablet With Teacher/@ Shuttersctock

Skills for the digital economy

by Simone Stelten
Consultant, Skills Beyond Schools Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Digital economies are powered by skills. People with the high-end skills needed to invent and apply new technologies are in high demand the world over. At the same time, the portfolio of basic skills needed to navigate technology-rich environments and function effectively in our connected societies has expanded.

How severe is the shortage of ICT skills? And what needs to be done to fill the gaps?

Today, 6% of total employment in OECD countries consists of ICT-specialists and ICT-intensive occupations account for more than 20% of all employment. OECD data on Key ICT Indicators shows that countries differ considerably in the share of ICT-intensive employment, ranging from high levels such as 35% in Luxembourg or 28% in the UK to 15% in Portugal and Greece or 11% in Turkey (data for 2010). Growing skills shortages have become a global concern. The Manpower Talent Shortage Survey 2012 puts IT positions at number 5 on the global list of top 10 jobs that employers are having difficulty filling. Only three years ago, IT professionals did not even feature on this list.

Across the OECD the supply of higher education graduates from ICT-related study fields has stagnated or even declined. The share of all STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates declined from 22.7% in 2000 to 20.4% in 2010, indicating a long-term stagnation of the supply from highly demanded science and technology oriented fields. The share of computer science graduates among all graduates has stagnated at around 3% since 2000 (OECD data). Even in the United States, the homeland of computers, the share of computing graduates declined from 4.3% in 2005 to 3.1% in 2010. Similar declines in recent years can be observed in many other countries, including the UK and Germany, pointing towards a risk of ICT skills shortages in many OECD countries.

So what can employers do to fill the skills gap? The study “Building Competitiveness and Business Performance with ICT” from the business school INSEAD shows that firms, which operate in the ICT sector, need to combine the right ICT investments with strong technical talent to be competitively agile. Through the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs employers have developed EU-wide initiatives, such as an online learning platform for ICT practitioners or open online ICT courses for secondary school teachers. Companies such as SAP set up study-programs, Microsoft will increase the number of apprenticeships and internships by 50% over 3 years, and Hewlett-Packard plans to train 500,000 IT-professionals globally by 2015. Clearly, government policy makers could do more to engage employers in meeting the skills challenges facing high value-added sectors.

What about ‘everyday ICT skills’? Survival in a digital economy now demands higher-level cognitive skills for understanding, interpreting, analysing and communicating complex information. The results of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), to be published on 8 October 2013, will provide unique comparative data on the basic skills of adults in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments. How to foster those skills effectively is the subject of another recent OECD report on Connected Minds: Technology and Today's Learners.

Tackling the ICT skills challenge will require new thinking and efforts to reach beyond ministerial silos and build partnerships with businesses, entrepreneurs and teachers. With its ‘whole-of-government’ approach to developing more effective national skills strategies, the OECD Skills Strategy offers a concrete roadmap for the future.

Links:
OECD Skills Strategy
OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)
OECD data on Key ICT Indicators
Connected Minds: Technology and Today's Learner
Photo credit: Future technology / Shutterstock

OECD Education Today… and tomorrow

by Barbara Ischinger
Director for Education

If you want to know what we’ve been doing over the past year or so, I invite you to take a look at the latest edition of Education Today 2013: The OECD Perspective. It covers the most important results and policy recommendations that have emerged from our work in early childhood education, compulsory schooling, higher education and lifelong learning. It also discusses such overarching topics as equity of opportunity, the benefits of education, and innovation.

When we think of innovation in education these days, we immediately think of technology: getting more computers into more classrooms, offering online courses to students in higher education. But as Education Today points out, while the industry for digital educational tools is growing, fewer than half of the specialised companies in that industry operate in the formal primary and secondary school sector. The report also notes that just because there are ICT devices in the classroom, it doesn’t mean that either teaching or learning strategies are changing. And while there are great expectations that online learning will attract those who have left – or have been left behind by – the education system, namely students from disadvantaged backgrounds or unmotivated students, so far there is no proof that this is happening.

New evidence (see the presentation by Patricia Kuhl here) shows that young children learn best when they make eye contact with their teachers – which means that they will never learn as much, or as well, sitting in front of a device. We’ve also found  that students’ attitudes towards using new technologies in school is far from what we might expect: they are more reluctant to use them than their image as “digital natives” suggests. And PISA  results show that the best-performing students are those who are motivated by their teachers.

What this evidence tells us is that no technology can replace the best teacher. But it also suggests that the best way to integrate new technologies into the classroom is to get the best teachers involved in developing the right pedagogical approaches to using them – and to include students in researching which strategies are the most effective. (This is how it’s done in Finland, a consistently high-performer in PISA.) New teaching approaches that incorporate these technologies should then be monitored and evaluated, and the results of those evaluations widely disseminated to avoid duplication of effort and begin promoting best practices. I plan to raise many of these issues in my keynote address to the LearnTec convention on “Future Learning” in Germany next month.

Looking further ahead, and towards potential lifelong learners, in late 2013 the OECD will oversee an Education and Skills Online Assessment that will help adults to identify their individual strengths and weaknesses in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments. This assessment is linked to our Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which will issue its first set of results in October 2013. The fact that the individual assessment will be conducted exclusively on line is an acknowledgement that the ability to read and navigate through digital texts is now essential if we want to participate fully in society. All the more reason – if any more were needed – to begin developing these skills today, in our youngest students, to give them one of the basic tools for learning throughout the rest of their lives.

Wishing you peace, prosperity and inspiration through learning…

For more information about OECD work on education:
www.oecd.org/edu

Photo credit: Little golden students with laptops /Shutterstock