Infinite Connections: The Digital Divide

by Tracey Burns
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills
Roxanne Kovacs 
 MSc in International Development at Sciences Po, Paris

In 1973, Martin Cooper, a researcher at Motorola, made the first call from a handheld mobile phone prototype. This phone weighed 1.1 kg, took 10 hours to re-charge and was limited to 30 minutes of talking time. When it was commercialized in 1983, the phone cost approximately 7,000 USD.

Today, only 30 years later, mobile phones are not just smaller and more affordable, they are also much more powerful. Smartphones now function as small computers and allow us to do everything from shopping online to programming complex applications.

Increasingly affordable, adaptable and powerful ICTs have influenced all aspects of our lives. As OECD societies continue to become more knowledge-intensive, the importance of digital skills continues to grow. And yet, not everyone in OECD countries has the digital skills they need to succeed in our modern world. A recently released Trends Shaping Education Spotlight analyses the role that education plays in ensuring that everyone can reap the benefits of our technology-rich world.

All indicators of ICT use (such as computers per household, global internet traffic and hours spent online) have grown in the last decade, effectively erasing the first digital divide between those who had access to computers and those who did not. However a second digital divide has emerged between individuals who moved to embrace a technology-rich world and those who have been left behind.

Part of this divide is generational: the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) shows that on average 16-24 year olds are much more competent at solving problems in technology-rich environments than their older counterparts. Further, in many countries large parts of the adult population have insufficient ICT problem-solving skills - meaning that they either failed the assessment or were unable to take part because they had never used a computer. Between 30% and 50% of the adult population in Ireland, Poland and the Slovak Republic fall into this category.

However, the digital divide is not only generational. Eight percent of young adults aged 16-24 also had insufficient ICT skills on the PIAAC assessment. Unfortunately, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to be less confident and less proficient at using new technologies. There is also a gender gap. Girls use ICTs less intensively and for fewer tasks on average than boys.

What does this mean for education? Schools can play a role in narrowing the digital divide in a number of ways. For disadvantaged students who don’t use ICTs at home, schools are an important access point. In addition, schools can help their students gain confidence in working with new technologies, not just in the classroom but also in their day to day life. Girls – who tend to make effective use of social media and other communication tools but can be less comfortable with programming and other types of software – can be supported to develop a wider array of digital skills.

Developing curriculae that take advantage of the individualised and personalised learning that is supported by ICTs is one good way to do this. Integrating technology into lessons is another: Social networks, often considered an impediment to learning in traditional classrooms, can also be used creatively. Facebook, for example, has been used by some teachers to bring characters from novels and poems to life.

Other examples include the flipped classroom, which attempts to invert the traditional model of teaching and learning by using technology to deliver lectures in the evenings, thus freeing teachers to work on assignments with students during the day. The “homework” in this case is the video lecture, not the exercises.

ICTs can also promote collaboration across schools and classrooms. For example, e-Twinning  is an initiative of the European Commission that aims to build a virtual community of schools. Available in twenty-five languages, it counted over 230 000 members in January 2014.

However, in spite of the potential of our schools to narrow the digital divide, ICTs have remained a niche phenomenon in many schools. Both teachers and students report that students’ ICT-use during lessons still lags far behind their use of ICT outside of school. And while teachers use ICTs for administrative tasks, they are far less likely to do so in their lessons.

What are the barriers to a more extensive adoption of ICTs in schools? Teachers need to be convinced of what works in the classroom, and how they could use technology to achieve those goals (European Schoolnet, 2013). One of the most prominent issues is a lingering concern about quality of ICTs as learning tools. There is a need to provide evidence of what works and how, as well as continuing efforts to improve the quality of educational resources and software.

Our world has changed at a rapid pace since Martin Cooper made the first call from a handheld mobile phone. Our schools and education systems must do their best to keep up, and ensure that all students have the digital skills they need to take part in our knowledge-intensive world.


Links: 
Connected Minds: Technology and Today’s Learners
OECD Communications Outlook 2013
OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills
Trends Shaping Education 2013 
Center for Education Research and Innovation (CERI)
More on Flipped classroom
More on eTwinning
Photo credit: Concentrated students in lecture hall working on their futuristic tablet during lesson / Shutterstock


 

Education professionals as social innovators

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress division, Directorate for Education and Skills

The famous French social scientist Emile Durkheim – the founding father of the academic discipline of sociology of education – grounded the view that by transmitting society and culture into the next generation, education was inevitably looking more to the past than to the future. His legendary quote – “Education is only the image and reflection of society. It imitates and reproduces the latter… it does not create it” – coined the notion of education merely ‘reproducing’ societies. When social change accelerates, it is no surprise that the ‘conservative’ role of education becomes increasingly perceived as a problem in itself. Today, many economic and political leaders tend to share the view that education is losing the race with technology and is not changing fast enough to cope with future challenges.

But is this a fair account? And how do professionals in the education sector view their own jobs? There are very few data sources to empirically assess the innovative potential of education. Measurement of innovation has progressed significantly in recent years, but applying such measures on education has been rare. The most recent issue of OECD Education Indicators in Focus, based on the new publication Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective produced by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), analyses measures of innovation in education by using data of the Research into Employment and Professional Flexibility (REFLEX) (2005) and Higher Education as a Generator of Strategic Competences (HEGESCO) (2008) surveys in 19 European countries on how tertiary graduates working in education perceive their own jobs. The results are surprising: no less than 59% of education professionals hold a highly innovative job.

Jobs are defined as highly innovative when tertiary educated employees say that they work in an organisation at the forefront of innovation and that they contribute themselves to innovation. With this measure of innovation it becomes possible to compare education with other sectors in society. In the manufacturing sector, 64.4% of the tertiary educated professionals work in highly innovative jobs, but education follows closely with 59.0%, well above the average across all sectors of 54.9%. The health sector, commonly perceived as more innovative than education, only counts 50.4% of jobs defined as highly innovative. Public administration closes the list with 39.5%. It is less of a surprise that within education there are huge differences between primary, secondary and tertiary (or higher) education: the higher education sector is, with 69.2%, the most innovative one, while primary (56%) and secondary (54%) education are situated much lower, but still around the cross-sector average.

Innovation research distinguishes between three types of innovation: ‘knowledge or methods’, ‘products or services’, and ‘technology, tools or instruments’. On average across sectors, innovation in knowledge or methods is the most prevalent one (36.6%), followed by innovation in products or services (28.8%) and innovation in technology, tools or instruments (21.3%). Education shares the same ranking of types of innovation, but with greater differences. Of all sectors, education has the highest percentage of highly innovative jobs in knowledge or methods: 48.5% (in higher education alone even going to 59.5%!). On the other hand, education is on the low side regarding innovation in technology, tools or instruments: only 20.6% (29.6% in higher education) of the tertiary educated professionals in education see their job as highly innovative for this type of innovation.

These data – which are innovative in themselves – put education in a different light than Emile Durkheim did more than a century ago. The idea that education is intrinsically conservative should be revisited, or at the least nuanced. Education professionals seem to align themselves more with the opposite view, of which John Dewey, the famous American philosopher of education, is the main exponent. By leading the next generation into the future, Dewey saw education as intrinsically progressive. In one of his most inspiring quotes – “Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself” – he equated education with growth and change, just as life itself. The progressive movement in American education of the mid-20th century was very much inspired by this idea and demonstrated that education could indeed lead the way in transforming society.

In various aspects education is as innovative as many other sectors, in some cases even more so. Certainly, a lot more should be done to make education a truly transformative engine of social change, to align it better to the changes 21st century societies are experiencing. But divergent views among stakeholders on the future of education should be discussed on their own terms, and not presented as a lack of innovation.

These data also show that it is good to listen to the voice of educational professionals themselves before making normative judgments on the education system. A few weeks ago the OECD published the results of the TALIS 2013 survey, an international survey of teachers on their profession and their working conditions. The TALIS data also present a different view on education than what outsiders typically believe: one of teachers generally satisfied with their job, confident that they are up to the challenges, but demanding more professional working conditions and a greater respect from society. The new data on innovation in education bring a similar message: education professionals presenting themselves as social innovators in a system perfectly capable of guiding social transformation.

Links:
Education Indicators in Focus, Issue No. 24, by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin and Gwénaël Jacotin
TALIS 2013 Survey
Measuring Innovation in Education: A New Perspective
On this topic, visit:
Education Indicators in Focus: www.oecd.org/education/indicators
On the OECD’s education indicators, visit:
Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators: www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm
Chart source: © OECD

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

Learning hard and “soft” skills through Internships

Ben Lyons Co-Director of Intern Aware, a British-based campaigning organization that promotes the rights and interests of young people entering the professional world, answers questions posed by Cassandra Davis educationtoday’s editor during his visit to the OECD 2013 Forum.

educationtoday: What kinds of skills do today’s graduates need to succeed in the labour market? Should students acquire skills to meet labour-market demands or to fulfill their own aspirations?

As well as theoretical knowledge, most employers require the strong soft skills such as commercial awareness, communication, teamwork, problem-solving and organisation that can be gained through work-related learning. The crisis has exposed the fact that students are worse off in countries where education is overly academic and institutions are failing to equip students with the skills they need for the labour market. With a greater focus on the hard and soft skills developed through individually tailored apprenticeships and internships, meeting labour market demands and fulfilling a young person’s aspirations need not be mutually exclusive.

educationtoday: Do you see greater opportunities for interns who have advanced technology-based skills?

It is evident today that in every sector a good knowledge of technology is needed and young people who don’t have these skills are going lose out. Skills are often referred to as being “generic”; however, there is a need for specialisation across all sectors, from arts to accountancy.

educationtoday: What is your take on the MOOC revolution? Do you think online virtual training could eventually reduce internships?

I’m skeptical of the MOOC revolution in relation to internships. Whilst some work can be done virtually, many of the soft skills from an internship – whether it’s meeting new people who might help with future job opportunities, or learning office conduct – are not going to be developed  if the intern is working hundreds of miles away. Embedding interns into a team is also beneficial for both parties, potentially bringing new ideas to the group, and helping employers judge if the intern would make a good “fit” with the organisation’s work culture.

educationtoday: How would you counter the claim that internships are just a way for businesses to get free labour? What can be done to reduce or eliminate this perception of exploitation?

Exploitation is a genuine problem that has been exacerbated by the economic crisis.  In Germany a survey has shown 81% of trainees are doing tasks done by regular staff, while the European Youth Forum estimates three-quarters of European interns receive insufficient payment to cover the cost of the internship. High-quality internships that are remunerated are shown to be extremely beneficial to both the intern and organisation. As internships represent the bridge between education and work; a diverse pool of interns is needed to ensure that employers are getting the best people, and this requires payment and recruitment based on merit.

educationtoday: University education is becoming prohibitively expensive in the US; in other places, students choose not to go to university because they feel they are not academically equipped.  What, then, can these students do to improve their chances in the labour market? Is vocational education now a viable alternative?

In today’s world we can only compete at the highest level if both tertiary education and vocational training are accessible and if they receive sufficient investment to be high quality. Vocational education is a viable alternative; however, in many countries such as the UK there has been a snobbish attitude towards VET and a consequence is a shortage of skills in sectors like manufacturing and engineering. In Germany, where VET is considered a credible path, many students go on to well paid, highly skilled jobs. Governments, businesses and educational institutions all need to raise their game and work more closely together. For example, businesses should have more input into vocational courses and funding for training colleges should be partially dependent on the institutions achieving high levels of employment.

Links:

OECD Skills Strategy 
OECD Skills Surveys
Give youth a chance
Working with youth
Vocational Education and Training - Learning for Jobs
Apprenticeships and Workplace Learning

Photo credit: Young people waiting for job interview / @Shutterstock

Competitions: the secret to developing and measuring skills?

Interview with David Hoey, Chief Executive Officer of WorldSkills International
by Cassandra Davis and Julie Harris, Editors, Educationtoday

“A high-performing athlete is the result of his or her training,” he explained during a break at the OECD Forum in Paris in May, focusing in on the question of how one benchmarks skills development and acquisition. “A well-trained athlete will perform well. But how do you measure ‘well’? Competitions draw out real excellence. By creating international skills competitions, deep learning can be demonstrated and witnessed. But more than that, competitions introduce fun into the process with games, introduces a healthy competitive spirit, and raises both levels and training. At WorldSkills, we’ve instituted a ranking and a scoring system, at the individual, sector and country levels.”

If we didn’t know better, we’d returned to the first Olympic games.

David Hoey, Chief Executive Officer of WorldSkills International spoke to us of the international skills extravaganza (WorldSkills Leipzig 2013) going on now, between 2-7 July. Over 200,000 people and representatives from upwards of 50 countries will be walking through the doors in Leipzig, attending the main and side events, witnessing some of the stellar skills and talents of the world’s top carpenters, graphic designers, technologists, robotic engineers, hairdressers, plumbers and more (46 skills in all).

But let’s learn more about David’s thoughts on the skills of today and tomorrow.

educationtoday: We’ve heard that 65% of today’s students (in the United States) will work in jobs that do not yet exist. Given this, what would you say the most important skills are to develop going forward?

David Hoey: I agree with this statistic. Traditional skills are not the future. Green and sustainability skills, for example, is a whole new area that requires both the traditional and a multi-discipline and a multi-skill approach.

educationtoday: Is there a big rise in the need for technical skills?

DH: Definitely. Look at the products consumers use today. They are born out of multi-disciplinary teams (concept, design, production). Look at what we are using, and how that drives what we will need to use. These needs are driving innovation and development. If we do not have a wider pool of creative and technically skilled individuals (and by this I mean those who can conceive product innovation and development, those who can design these needs-driven, future-oriented products and solutions, and those who can produce such products and solutions), then our economies will suffer and progress will be stilled by the shortfall. 

Take a look, for example, at wireless networks in developing countries. This is just one example of a need developing (communication, learning, getting help), but the development of the solution (creation of a wireless network) not being logical or straightforward. The solution was leap-frog, and around, rather than linear. Would you have thought to create a wireless network in Africa? Would you have been able to do it?

educationtoday: What is your take on the MOOC (massive open online course) revolution?  Is it a threat to vocational education?

DH: We’re seeing a move to online delivery, that’s true. But you still have to demonstrate competency and excellence. At WorldSkills International, we run skills competitions to show skills competency. MOOCs is another method for developing skills, but the proof is in the pudding.

At WorldSkills, we provide the ability for countries to benchmark themselves against other countries, and provide individuals the opportunity to showcase their competency excellence – moving beyond a binary system of “competency or not”.

I’ll give you an example of what these competitions do. Finland hosted the WorldSkills competition in 2005. Do you know what happened? 70% of its youth increased VET (vocational education and training) enrolments from 37% to 44%. That’s a lot of youth deciding to develop their skills.

We want to show young people that a career in skills trades technologies is a very good option. If you can find people who can do something with their hands, put them together with design people and technicians, and by this I mean technicians with knowledge of both mechanics and design, then you’re in a great place. We need people who can do, in addition to those who can conceive and talk about their ideas.

educationtoday: Is there such a thing as a universal set of skills that is valued nearly everywhere? If so, what does that skill set look like? 

DH: Team work, project management, costing. These are but a few. But it’s not the individual skills. It’s the combination with traditional skills (reading, writing, arithmetic) that makes the whole package so powerful.

Links:
WorldSkills International 
OECD work on skills
OECD work on Vocational Education and Training
OECD Skills beyond School reviews: Austria and Germany
International Conference: “Skilling the Future – VET and Workplace Learning for Economic Success”, Leipzig, Germany (during the WorldSkills Leipzig 2013 event).
Barbara Ischinger, Director for Education and Skills: Global Award for Leadership in Education and Workforce Development   
Follow #GSx2013 @OECD_edu for coverage on twitter and livestreaming
Related blog post: Skills on Show
Photo credit : Flickr

Diverging levels of research efficiency change the global landscape of innovation

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Recovering from the current recession and building a sustainable economy based on growth and social progress require investments in innovative research. No future is imaginable without a new wave of innovation. But innovative ideas come from creative research, in many cases produced by universities and research institutions. Over the past decades countries have generally increased their investment in R&D, leading to higher numbers of researchers, more research activities and higher research output. Thanks to more sophisticated indicators and monitoring tools, we are now able to measure progress in research and to evaluate the impact of research in the global research system.

This global research system still is a rather concentrated system, with a very strong core and a wide periphery. Despite globalization and increasing access to research findings thanks to technology, many countries still are completely absent from this global community. Of the research universities included in the top 200 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2012, more than half are in the United States (76) or the United Kingdom (31). In research the world is becoming flat only at a very, very slow pace. This is strange, because sharing ideas and knowledge on the Internet is even easier than transferring money. And, in contrast to money, sharing knowledge enriches both parties in the communication chain.

Yet, the massive size of the research infrastructure in the core countries is partly misleading. We know a lot about many input measures, but they tell us only one side of the story. What matters more is the impact of research. Bibliometric measures such as citation and impact scores, calculated from big databases, now allow seeing where the most relevant research is located. Next to research measures, since 2010 the new methodology of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings now also include good measures of research impact, with citation indicators developed with Thomson Reuters, the global leader in research database management. These data are now mostly used to compare universities, but we also can use them to compare countries and shifts in the global research system over time.

The United States still are world leaders when it comes to investments in research. The output of their universities in terms of size and impact puts the country among a select few in the world. Based on the average of their 76 universities in the 2012 ranking, the US score 85.21 points on the citations indicator. But the average score of French (83.40), Irish (81.50) and Swiss (81.20) universities in the top 200 follow closely. The strange thing is that the citations score does seem to have almost no relationship with the research score, which basically is a measure of input. Comparing individual universities on both measures, there is an extreme variation between the two scores. High investments do not at all generate automatically high outputs in terms of citations and impact. On a country level we even see a negative correlation between the research input score and the citations score of -.53. This is mainly due to Asian countries such as China, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore, who make huge investments in research but still fail to generate impact. The average research input score of all these Asian countries is higher than the average score for US universities, while their average citations score is much lower. These countries learn that it doesn’t suffice to create an excellent research infrastructure, but that it takes time and probably specific policies to generate research which finds its way into the heart of the global knowledge system.

Dividing citations scores by research scores gives a proxy for research efficiency in a country, at least among the universities who can compete with the very best in the world. Countries with the best level of research efficiency are France, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland, and all of them do better than the US or the UK. Adding a time dimension makes the picture even more contrasting: these five countries are all improving their research efficiency over a period of two years with comparable data (2010-12), while China, Chinese Taipei, Korea, and Singapore, together with Australia and Austria are below average and decreasing in research efficiency (see graph above).

The global research system definitely is diversifying beyond the two traditional core countries with world-class universities, but the countries in the immediate periphery, mainly in Europe, are the ones who benefit from that. They are not as massively investing as for example Asian countries, but they do it much more effectively, probably by targeting their knowledge strategies better. Ultimately, it will be the research that matters which will find its way into innovation. Smart and targeted policies are probably much more effective than ambitious, but very broad investment policies.

Links:
OECD finds greater efficiency outside the elite: Times Higher Education
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Chart source: OECD

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

2much 2handle? Schools, social networks, and cyber bullying

by Tracey Burns
Analyst and Project Leader,  Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

“I’m really worried but I don’t know how to react” my friend told me over coffee the other day. Her daughter, 11, had told her that she was being bullied online, but would not say by whom.

“What can I do? And how do I know if it’s serious or not?”

A just released OECD publication looks at how rapid technological development has changed the way we interact with each other and our communities. Despite the enormous potential of the Internet to reshape our world, there is a downside to infinite connectivity. Internet fraud, privacy concerns and identity theft are all part of the online world. For parents and children, worries about cyber bullying and protecting children from explicit content and online predators are crucial.

Cyber bullying occurs when a child, preteen or teen is threatened, harassed, or embarrassed by another young person using the Internet. A number of high–profile tragedies, for example teens who committed suicide as a result of cyber bullying, have brought this topic to the top of policy, education, and parental agendas. However the extent of cyber bullying is hard to estimate, varying from more than 10% of surveyed internet users aged 9 16 years in Australia, Estonia, Denmark, Sweden and the Russian Federation to between 2- 3%, in Italy, Portugal and Turkey. While cyber bullying is worrisome, bullying offline is still reported to be more common.

Interestingly, the bully and victim roles are often interchangeable and related: those who admitted bullying others were more likely to report being bullied themselves, both online and offline. Guides to protecting Internet users make it clear that the best preventive strategies involve awareness, constant vigilance, and keeping an open dialogue about children’s concerns and online lives. For education, this poses a series of tough questions. What responsibilities do educators have in monitoring student’s time online during school hours? How can different parental standards of safety be accommodated?

The advent of cyber bullying is just one example of technological changes sweeping OECD countries. Trends Shaping Education 2013 looks at 14 of these trends and their possible impact on education, including:

• Social networking: Founded in 2004, Facebook had over 1 billion active users by September 2012. Should schools see social network sites as an opportunity to extend the learning process/experience beyond the classroom?
• Increasing diversity of local content: Since the mid 2000s the diversity of languages on the Internet has increased dramatically. There are now over 250 languages online, with English, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish comprising the top five. Does local diversity of Internet content lead to better or worse quality of information available for students?
• The evolution of the Internet: In January 2009, there were 15 000 downloadable applications, or “apps” available. By September 2012, this figure had grown to over 1.5 million. Is there a market for educational apps to improve learning in the classroom and extend it beyond?

The transformation of the Internet is felt throughout the entire world, including the poorest regions. Trends Shaping Education 2013 provides a powerful snapshot of these trends and links these data to the evolution of our classrooms and schools. How can educators develop their students’ critical capacity to use and contribute to the wealth of information available at the click of a button? What kind of quality control should we expect from e-learning? How can teachers make the best use of ICTs for teaching and learning?

These are just some of the questions we must ask ourselves when planning for the medium and long term of technology in our education systems. Our world is changing. The question is: are our schools evolving too?

Links:
Trends Shaping Education 2013

This is the second of a series of blogs issued for the release of Trends Shaping Education 2013. You can find the first one here:
The weight of nations: the shape of things to come?

Photo credit: Cyber bullying concept/ Shutterstock.com

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

Hooked to be connected!

by Lynda Hawe
Communications Officer, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), Directorate for Education OECD

Concerned parents are becoming more and more anxious as they watch their bright children getting completely absorbed by and attached to new mobile devices.  Young people’s attachment to digital media and connectivity will shortly reach a level of almost universal saturation. In some OECD countries, more than 95% of 15-year-olds use an internet connected computer daily while at home. How many of us have experienced frustration while trying to get kids to actually listen, as their eyes remain glossily glued to their favourite pet gadget?  So just how worried should we really be? Well, it still remains difficult to clearly identify the risks or rewards of such behaviour, especially in relation to long-term learning and brain functions.  But first, let’s be reassured - it’s not all bad news!

The OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has just released an inspiring new publication called Connected Minds: Technology and Today's Learners, authored by Francesc Pedró. This book has wisely researched technology in relation to emerging issues for education.  Particularly, given that digital media and connectedness are an essential part of the lives of today’s learners, schools and teachers must now cope with the new responsibilities in relation to these skills.  This explorative book tackles the issue and helps to contribute to filling the knowledge gap.

Frankly, it’s not about the technology, but it’s all about connectedness. Connectedness, which is the capacity to benefit from connectivity for personal, social, work or economic purposes, is having an impact on all areas of human activity. Consequently, devices and gadgets are less important than the ability to be connected and seizing the opportunities that connectedness offers. Education is expected to play an important role in this transformation as it can equip individuals with the required skills for harnessing the opportunities that the knowledge economy and society offers.

In particular, teachers need to be well prepared in terms of the potential pedagogical benefits of new technologies. Challenges for schools and teachers are to better integrate the new digital media and the resulting innovative social practices into the daily experience of schooling.  With the objective to help learners to make the most out of connectedness, while enabling teachers to improve their skills. In addition, teachers should simultaneously pay attention to the different needs of learners and provide increased support to those who come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds.

It is very reassuring to discover that Mobile Learning is emerging as one of the solutions to the challenges faced by education. As described in UNESCO’s Mobile Learning project, it offers unique characteristics in comparison to conventional e-learning: personal, portable, collaborative, interactive, contextual and situated.  As well as the fact that it highlights "just-in-time-learning", since instruction can be delivered anywhere and at anytime.

Nobody can predict what new technologies may bring, or how the teaching and learning experience in education will evolve over the next decade.  So in the meantime, let’s just stay aware of the learning opportunities, while keeping a caring eye on the gadget screens as well as a little clock beside the video-games, see Setting Computer Limits Tips.   Of course, not with the intention to deprive youngsters of all the fun, but just to ensure that the final rewards will fully outweigh any eventual risks.

Links:
OECD work on New Millenium Learners
Activities: Centre for Eduational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Photo Credit: © Eric Audras/Onoky/Corbis

Skills revolution will come from the grassroots

Sanjit Bunker Roy figured out pretty early on that it does, indeed, take a village; in fact, it takes a village to keep a village. He founded the Barefoot College in India in 1972 on the premise that for any rural development activity to be successful and sustainable, it must be both based in the village and managed and owned by those whom it serves. The College, a non-governmental organisation, serves rural men and women of all ages, all of whom are barely literate (if at all) and have no hope of getting even the lowest government job, by providing training in such skills as solar engineering, water drilling, hand-pump engineering, masonry, architecture, and computing.

Marilyn Achiron, Editor of the Education Department caught up with Roy when he was in Paris to speak at the OECD Forum. He’s not one to mince his words:

“We are facing a disaster of monumental proportions,” says Roy. “We’re training people to leave the village, not to stay in the village. We’re encouraging migration at a colossal level from village to city. As a result, we’re losing all the traditional knowledge and skills that used to be in the village. Does anyone at the mover-and-shaker level have the courage and vision to turn this around? We’re already set in a pattern that we can’t break.”

According to Roy, whom Time magazine named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, the big international donors are part of the problem, and not enough of the solution. “People aren’t listening enough. The biggest problem with the big donors is that they don’t have the ability or the humility to listen to what’s happening on the ground. We need to respect traditional knowledge and skills; you cannot be educated at the expense of tradition. It’s a balance. There’s a real urgent situation out there and we’re not treating it with urgency.”

A dissatisfaction with policies designed in the relative comfort of developed-world capitals while more than one in five people in the world live on less than USD 1.25 a day comes across clearly. The OECD is not spared Roy’s frustration: “The OECD’s attitude towards education is outdated. In the non-organised, informal world, people have no access to water, electricity, formal education. The OECD’s attitude is dangerous. They have to revisit it and adapt it to the reality on the ground. They have lost touch.” Even the OECD Skills Strategy, released earlier this week already needs updating:  “There will be a skills revolution from the grassroots. The current thinking has to change. The question is: How do you recognise skills that people already have and apply them in the situation in which they live? The OECD is very backwards in its thinking.”

Between 2007 and 2011, the Barefoot College trained some 300 grandmothers, from 29 countries throughout Africa, in solar technologies. After their six-month training course—paid for, along with their air fare, by the Indian government—they went back to their villages and solar electrified some 15,000 houses. Says Roy, “These illiterate grandmothers know more about the repair and maintenance of solar lamps and installations than any graduate of any five-year university anywhere in the world. And if anyone wants to challenge me on it, I’d be delighted.”

Links:
Barefoot College
Watch the TED Talk: Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement
OECD Skills Strategy
Visit our interactive portal on skills: http://skills.oecd.org
OECD Forum 2012
Photo credit: Colourful feet / Shutterstock

Educating for innovative societies

Professor Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, answers questions posed by educationtoday's editor Cassandra Davis during his visit to OECD to present at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation conference on Educating for Innovative Societies.

Cassandra Davis: In your book “Five minds for the future”, you call for the development of five types of thinking: the disciplined, synthesizing, creative, respectful and ethical. In your opinion, are schools equally responsible for the development of these minds? How could schools best develop these skills?

Howard Gardner: The traditional role of school is to develop minds that are disciplined—both in the sense of mastering the major disciplinary ways of thinking and in the sense of working steadily towards the development of any intellectual skill.  Synthesizing and creating are also intellectual/cognitive capacities, and thus within the purview of school, and they are more important in the 21st century than ever before. But educators have less experience in training these ‘habits of mind’ and unless teachers themselves have these latter skills, they will not be able to inculcate them effectively in students.

Ideally, the challenges of respectful and ethical minds would be taken up by the larger society—political leaders, media creators, parents, and workers. But in countries like the United States, we cannot count on much help from these individuals and institutions. Respect and ethics cannot be conveyed didactically—they have to be embodied in the behaviors and attitudes of the adults and older children in schools.  The creation of ‘common spaces’, where members of a school community can discuss challenging issues is one  step that can and should be taken.

CD: If you could change one thing in school practices, what would it be? Why?

HG: In psychology, we distinguish between the Figure and the Ground. The Figure is the dominant focus in a graphic presentation—for example, a portrait of a royal figure—and the Ground consists of the background shadows and patterns which support, rather than divert attention from, the Figure.  Throughout the developed and developing world, the Figure in recent years has become scores on standardized tests—and OECD has contributed to this focus. There is nothing wrong with having good test scores, but there is something VERY WRONG when societies prioritize scores over everything else.

And so, if I could change one thing, it would be to put another Figure at the center of our educational landscape: the kinds of human beings we want to nurture and the kind of society we want to create.  Everything in the background—including test scores—should contribute to those overarching goals.  Most of the problems in the world are not created by teachers or students with low test scores. They are created and magnified by individuals with high test scores—and that includes those of us who are reading (and in my case writing)  those words—who push self aggrandizement and power  ahead of the creation of a healthy society populated by ethical individuals. In the United States, we refer ironically to ‘the best and the brightest’—the Harvard and Yale graduates who brought us into the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and the financial crises of 2001 and 2008.

If you think I have strong opinions about these matters, you are right!

CD: In your latest book "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed," you stress that, with technological advances, factual information has become readily available, and the need to memorize is no longer that important. How can students today develop critical thinking, and understand what is true and why?

HG: Yes,  when the answers to factual questions are available at the movement of a mouse or the click of a button, there is no point in spending time committing the information to memory. Recently, a talented student said to me “Why bother to go to school, when the answers to all questions are contained in my hand held device?”  I responded to him, rather pointedly, ‘”Yes, the answer to all questions, except the important ones.”

The student reflected an increasingly widely held view that either a question can be answered by a computer or it is not worth asking or it cannot be answered decisively and so should not be tackled at all.  But as your question indicates, we cannot and should not accept all information obtained ‘online ‘ or ‘offline’ as true—even if the authority is thought to be reliable.

And so, going forward, our focus in schools (and outside of school) should be on understanding the METHODS whereby assertions are made, the way that a question is posed, how relevant data and arguments are marshaled, what kinds of challenges have been considered, how have they been responded to, etc.  One should never read a single account of the causes of the French revolution or the role of heritability in the distribution of human traits.  Instead, one needs to probe deeply on how various accounts and graphics and data arrays have been created and used as a foundation for a conclusion.

Ironically, we live at a time in the history of the world where it is MORE POSSIBLE than ever before to determine what is true and what is not.  But one has to be willing to take the time to interrogate sources of all sorts and to change one’s mind if the data and arguments point in another direction.   In the future, we will pay increasing attention to those sources of information that are known to be DISinterested—not pushing a particular agenda, being ready to consider alternative points of view, to admit error and to publish corrections. Alas, these are not the first descriptors that come to mind when one considers the average blog!

Links:
For more information on Professor Howard Gardner visit his website: www.howardgardner.com
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation

Photo credit: Ammit / © Shutterstock

Boys, girls and hypertext

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Indicators and Analysis Division, Directorate for Education

Computers, cell phones and tablets are now so much a part of our lives that we can’t even remember what life was like before them—much less figure out how we managed to get through the day without consulting them. The youngest students now surf the Net with the skill of cyber beach boys and text friends as easily as waving at them.

Or do they?

In 2009 PISA conducted a groundbreaking survey of digital literacy  among 15-year-old students. PISA wanted to find out whether boys and girls are as ready for the digital age as they—and we—think they are. As the latest issue of PISA in Focus shows, while many students may have the technological skills, not all have the cognitive skills to fully capitalise on technology to access, manage, integrate and evaluate digital information.

On average, PISA results show that student performance in digital reading is closely related to performance in print reading, meaning that those students who are proficient in reading texts on paper are also proficient in reading texts on a screen. But in some countries, such as Australia and Korea, students score significantly higher in digital reading than in print reading; while in other countries, notably Hungary, Poland and the partner country Colombia, students are better in print reading than in digital reading.

Perhaps the most interesting finding from this assessment has to do with the difference in digital literacy between girls and boys. Since the beginning of the PISA tests in 2000, girls have always scored higher in reading than boys–and by a substantial margin: the equivalent of one year of formal schooling. While this is still true for reading digital texts, the performance gap is significantly narrower: 24 score points compared with 38 score points in print reading.

A closer look at these results showed that there was a larger percentage of boys at the highest proficiency levels in digital reading than at the highest levels in print reading, and a smaller percentage of boys at the bottom proficiency levels in digital reading scale than at the bottom level in print reading.

What might account for this? Digital literacy involves more than using a computer and reading words, even if those words are on a screen rather than on a piece of paper. To be literate in digital reading, one must also be able to navigate easily through hypertexts, that is, construct one’s own text using embedded links to other texts and materials, rather than reading a text in predetermined sequence. Boys might be more interested–and have greater experience–in navigating through hypertexts than in reading a printed page.

In turn, that important finding could be used by parents, educators and policy makers to set in motion a “virtuous cycle” whereby encouraging boys to read more on line would lead to better digital reading proficiency which, in turn, would instill greater enjoyment of reading, which, ultimately, could lead to better reading performance in both print and digital media.

For more information:
on PISA: www.pisa.oecd.org
Full set of PISA in Focus: www.oecd.org/pisa/infocus
Students On Line: Digital Technologies and Performance, explores students’ use of information technologies to learn

Photo credit: ©Hemera/Thinkstock 

What future for the family?

by Barrie Stevens
Head, International Futures Programme

The family landscape in OECD countries has changed enormously over the last few decades. The extended family has all but disappeared in many places, and the traditional family – the married couple with children – is much less widespread than it used to be.  Of course, this has a lot to do with other things that have been happening in society – divorce rates have been rising, as has the number of cohabiting couples and couples “living together apart”, and single parenthood and same-sex partnerships have increased too.  Many more women have taken up work, adolescents spend longer in education, and elderly family members live longer and, frequently, alone.

So, are we witnessing the fragmentation of the family?  Well, not quite, because at the same time, we are seeing family relations start to reconfigure on new foundations. We see networks of loosely connected family members from different marriages, partnerships and generations emerging, with fresh attitudes and approaches to cohesion and solidarity. We see technological progress (mobile phones, Facebook, Skype…) bringing new opportunities for easy, frequent communication among family members, and medical progress improving the health and reducing the dependence of the elderly on other family members.

Whatever we may think of these new trends in family structures and relations, many of them could be here to stay.  The national statistical offices of a dozen or so OECD countries have recently conducted or commissioned, quite independently of one another, long-term projections of household and family composition. Detailed comparisons among the different forecasts are not very useful, because the start dates, time horizons and methods used vary from study to study. What is striking however, is that the underlying trends revealed by the estimates show strong similarities.  For example: All the studies, without exception, expect significant increases by 2025/30 both in the number and in the proportion of one-person households.  Similarly, almost all of them expect a substantial rise both in the number of single-parent households and in the share of single-parent households as a percentage of all households with children.  And almost all expect significant increases in the number of couples without children.

Just to be clear.  These are projections and not predictions of the future. They serve to illustrate the growth and change in families or households that would occur if certain assumptions about marriage, divorce, fertility, work, values, migration, etc. were to prevail over the projection period.  These are impossible to predict.  However, it has to be said that social structures are not given to rapid transformation. In the absence of extreme events, key trends such as the expansion of higher education, the growing participation of women in the labour market and the rising numbers of dependent elderly all seem set to become a permanent feature of the next couple of decades.

 This suggests that quite strong likelihoods attach to the projections, and calls for strengthening the links among family-relevant aspects of different policy domains, such as care for children and the elderly, labour market, education, technology and housing.

If the above projections are indeed a reasonable reflection of the future, then we need to start thinking about some of the possible consequences.  The OECD’s The Future of Families to 2030 report, which will be published in January 2012, offers a foretaste.  For example:  the growing numbers of single-person households will put increased pressure on housing and in many cases complicate the task of preserving family cohesion; the expected increase in single-parent families, the numbers of cohabiting couples and reconstituted families could lead to more such families facing a higher risk of poverty; and the increase in childless couple households, divorce rates, remarriages and stepfamilies may weaken family ties and undermine capacity for informal family care.

What are the long-term  consequences for education? If, as many experts suspect, the home is set to grow in importance as a locus of learning, where does that leave families that are less able to support their children with the requisite time, technology and resources?

The next 20 years look pretty challenging – for families and for policy makers alike.

Links:
For more on the OECD International Futures Programme: www.oecd.org/futures
The Future of Families to 2030, a synthesis report
OECD,  Doing Better for Families, 2011
OECD, Higher Education to 2030, Vol. 1, Demography
OECD, Trends Shaping Education, 2010
Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators
OECD work on Education and Social Progress

Some National links to household statistics:

• Australia 
• Austria
• England
• France 
• Germany
•  Japan 
• New Zealand