Digital technology, including AI, can improve the effectiveness and quality of education by personalising education, be it teaching and learning or other education services, by making it more inclusive and possibly equitable, and by improving the cost-efficiency of the sector. A digital transformation of education also comes with risks that must be mitigated. The findings of the Digital Education Outlook 2023 suggest a few areas where countries should focus their efforts to catalyse their ongoing journey of digitising the education operations towards a proper digital transformation.
Digital education
Data and digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are powerful drivers of innovation in education, offering transformative opportunities for system and school management as well as for teaching and learning. However, they also create policy issues, such as equity concerns and interoperability, that countries need to mitigate.
Key messages
Several policy levers can help shape effective digital education ecosystems, inclusive of digital infrastructure, governance and human competences. These different models of provision and governance of digital education may, or may not, follow countries’ usual devolution of responsibilities. Beyond the public provision or procurement of publicly owned or private digital education tools and resources, policy levers include incentivising the development of teachers and students digital skills, fostering interoperability within the system, setting in place risk-management approaches to privacy and data protection, and creating institutions to facilitate the implementation of digital education policies.
Countries should balance different policy objectives to make the most intelligent use of AI in education. AI has the potential to improve the quality and equity of learning, free up teachers’ time to focus on their teaching and provide students with new routes to learning, provided that teachers and learners are given the right conditions to use such technologies. But its use also comes with new risks such as widening inequalities due to inequal access to technology, weaker usage by students and educators intimidated by technology, disparities in the capacity of educators and learners to make full use of their potential, challenges to assure the quality of digital resources, and data privacy.
Context
Countries now provide a minimal digital infrastructure
Most countries now maintain longitudinal student information systems and other digital management tools that support their educational processes: alert systems to enforce compulsory education, admission management, evaluations, etc. They also support the provision of digital teaching, learning resources and training.
Most countries are at the digitisation stage
Most countries have yet to fully leverage the capabilities offered by advanced digital tools. Very few AI-based educational resources are available in the classroom, and in almost all countries, AI text generators are the only AI tool commonly used by students, with or without the blessing of their teachers. Adaptive learning or assessment systems are absent from most OECD education systems.
