Part of the information presented in this volume and in the OECD Digital Education Outlook 2023 comes from a systematic survey of OECD countries and Brazil regarding their digital education infrastructure and their governance of digital education as of December 2023.
The OECD designed two distinct policy questionnaires that inquired about countries and jurisdictions’:
Digital education infrastructure: what digital tools and resources are publicly provided, at what levels of education and through what means; which are commonly accessible to schools, teachers, and students regardless of public provision; where the public/private responsibility boundaries lie for providing digital tools and resources and for supporting their use; and what countries consider as their priorities for further development. Two types of digital infrastructure are distinguished: the infrastructure for system and school management and the infrastructure for teaching and learning. This questionnaire can be accessed here.
Governance of digital education: how do countries and jurisdictions govern, regulate, encourage the access to, and use of, digital technology and smart data in education; how do they integrate teachers and students in their digital ecosystem; what are their procurement policies and practices; how do they ensure school procurements comply with policy objectives on equitability, effectiveness, security, data protection, interoperability; how do they collaborate with the EdTech sector and other education stakeholders to ensure that innovation, research and development are incentivised and useful for teachers and students; how do they encourage research on and through digital education. This questionnaire can be accessed here.
The two questionnaires were designed to work with respondents representing different levels of their countries’ governments. Each country was expected to provide a response at the central/national level. In addition, a couple of responses at the sub-national level supplemented the national answer where relevant.
All information collected from central and subnational levels of government were supplemented by a series of bilateral interviews with all relevant jurisdictions to review and validate their responses, understand the context, and ensure comparability across countries and jurisdictions. This work was complemented with desk research and several rounds of consultations with countries and jurisdictions that provided iterative feedback.