innovations in education

These 12 innovators are transforming the future of education

Quality education is vital in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but this has been significantly disrupted by COVID-19. Image:  UNSPLASH/Ivan Aleksic

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Michele Parmelee

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• COVID-19 continues to disrupt schoolchildren’s right to a quality education.
• In March 2021, schools in 57 countries were still closed, according to the World Bank.
• Deloitte launched the World Class Education Challenge on the World Economic Forum's UpLink platform to search for innovators who are bridging gaps in learning and access.
• Deloitte will invest US$1 million in the 12 top innovations, announced today, supporting them to scale their solutions to impact more learners. This is part of Deloitte’s World Class ambition to provide educational opportunities to 100 million individuals by 2030.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s workers, problem-solvers and leaders. Access to a quality education is vital not just for children to thrive, but for social and economic development.

The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals set out that every child should have a free, quality primary and secondary level education. It’s estimated that the disruptions to education resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have set back progress in educational gains by 20 years . While all students were impacted by the pandemic, the difference between the privileged, and those being left behind, has widened even further.

In India, for example, one study suggests nearly 40% of students in less privileged households have not been able to study at all. And the government estimates some 30 million schoolchildren have no access to smartphones, devices or the internet to attend school online.

World Class Education Challenge

Deloitte is committed to using this moment to truly catalyze change. We must identify what is working, the new ways and innovations that are delivering results for students, and scale them. To find ideas with the highest potential for impact and scale, Deloitte ran the World Class Education Challenge on the World Economic Forum’s UpLink platform.

The Challenge had three focus areas: providing equitable access for students being left behind; investing in teachers’ development; and equipping students with the skills they will need in 2030. It focused on finding solutions in Africa, India and Asia Pacific.

From almost 400 submissions, 12 innovators have been selected. These individuals and their organizations will work alongside Deloitte professionals to help address the global education crisis. They will also receive up to US$1 million in professional services on a pro bono basis and financial grants.

Announcing the Top UpLink innovators

The 12 innovations chosen to be Top UpLink innovators are:

Developed with the needs of African teachers in mind, Learnable is an augmented teaching assistant that allows teachers to compose and distribute dynamic, interactive lessons via a dedicated mobile app and WhatsApp. Lessons can be saved offline, so that students do not need constant internet access.

Nomad Education

Nomad Education is a free mobile app which offers 350 academic certificates that helps more than 1 million francophone children every year to succeed in their studies, whatever their social, geographic or academic background.

Pan-African Robotics Competition

The Pan-African Robotics Competition (PARC) is the largest robotics competition in Africa and has educated more than a 1000 African youth in Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM), while also offering a Virtual Learning Platform (VLP) to enable the African youth to virtually learn to code, design and build their own robots. It also integrates a feature for collaboration and knowledge exchange.

A lack of quality STEM education directly impacts productivity and economic development in Nigeria. Millions of students have no access to traditional laboratories, which are expensive to build and maintain, says Oyebisi. StanLab is a cloud-based, 3D virtual laboratory platform, providing near real-life laboratory experience for students without access to physical laboratories.

UCT Online High School

UCT Online High School's mission is to turn physical limitations into digital opportunities for Africa’s children to access aspirational, quality secondary school education. Its purpose-built online school and free online curriculum pave the way for high quality, online and blended learning to be delivered at scale, and stimulate digital transformation of the education systems on the continent.

Call-A-Kahaani

Emotional intelligence, critical thinking and problem solving are key skills for the future of work. Call-a-Kahaani is Udhyam Learning Foundation's Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform to empower youth with entrepreneurial mindsets, leveraging engaging interactive storytelling.

Ekatra is a tool for educators and organizations to deliver learning at scale, using text (including SMS and WhatsApp) message-based micro courses targeted to improve learning, with the mission to bring important knowledge to people no matter what their circumstances are.

Rocket Learning

Rocket Learning builds vibrant digital communities of parents and teachers to support foundational learning for some of the world's most underprivileged children. It is helping 20,000 teachers reach over 200,000 parents daily with contextualized content in their local language sent via WhatsApp groups. This supports parents with the crucial early years education, including teaching children to recognize letters and numbers.

ASIA PACIFIC

#GenEducators

An initiative of Generation Peace, this solution aims to empower educators to reinvent the way they teach. The web-based learning platform is designed to help Indonesian educators encourage innovation in their classrooms – and raise the next generation of critical thinkers. It offers practical tools, proven strategies, and best practices from around the world to inspire future change-makers.

Komerce is transforming the lives of rural Indonesian communities by unlocking e-commerce potential through education. The innovative platform teaches Indonesian youth e-commerce skills, and connects them with small and medium-sized enterprises in their rural towns, to both boost the local economy and provide opportunities for young people.

Scaling Skills That Matter

An innovation of The Posify Group, The Posify Academy is a student-led, evidence-based combined well-being and career development platform, arming youth with a sense of purpose and equipping them with future skills, so they can navigate this rapidly evolving world with confidence, and uncover and deliver their unique potential.

Tech-Voc Career Accelerator Program

An initiative of Edukasyon.ph, Tech-Voc Career Accelerator drives youth not in education, employment and training (NEET) in the Philippines to the frontlines of employment by transforming their interest into a passion for technical-vocational work through holistic skills development, industry training and linkages, and continuous learning.

The group of top innovators submitted to the education challenge were officially announced during the Sustainable Development Impact Summit. You can watch the session and find out more about the solutions here .

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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.”

Innovation and technology to accelerate progress in education

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Rebecca winthrop , rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop eileen mcgivney , em eileen mcgivney former research associate - center for universal education timothy p. williams , and tpw timothy p. williams postdoctoral fellow in education priya shankar ps priya shankar former research assistant - center for universal education, brookings institution.

February 23, 2017

Sustainable Development Goal 4, to ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning, sets out a grand ambition for education systems around the globe to achieve not just universal primary schooling, but to expand universal education from early childhood to secondary school and achieve relevant learning outcomes. While the Millennium Development Goals helped propel millions of children into primary school, meeting this larger goal in the coming decade and a half will require accelerated progress and a break from business as usual.

This report, prepared by researchers from the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution for the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, describes the major gaps in education and the need for innovation to meet ambitious goals. Not only are children in low- and middle-income countries about 100 years behind their peers in measures of schooling, but rapid advances in technology, changes to the world of work, and the complex global challenges we face today call for a broader set of competencies every young person will need to be successful. To thrive in a changing world, young people will need skills and competencies that include information literacy, flexibility, critical thinking and collaboration in addition to academic knowledge.

To achieve this broader vision of education will take new approaches that can reach children who have not yet been reached, get better results in learning outcomes, and drive down costs. This study surveyed the current landscape of innovations in education by conducting a scan and compiling an inventory of programs, schools, and tools currently being used around the globe to achieve these aims. To be as inclusive as possible, the scan included innovations which have not yet been proven through rigorous evaluations as well as many small-scale innovations.

We find that innovation is happening all over the world in many different contexts and by a diversity of actors, and that those which hold the most promise for accelerating progress for marginalized children can be categorized into four broad areas:

• Hands-on, Minds-on Learning: Innovations from high-tech schools to programs in the slums are incorporating an active, student-centered approach to transform the teaching and learning environment
• Elevating the Education Workforce: Models that connect teachers to each other and leverage technology or community members are unburdening teachers, while other innovations are helping bring more people into teaching
• Streamlining Schools: In various contexts schools are deploying technology to help improve back-office efficiencies, collect better data, and streamline communication inside schools and with parents
• Activating Communities for Accountability and Delivery: Communities around the world are leveraging their resources to demand and deliver education, and new approaches are engaging communities through data to improve school accountability

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Global Economy and Development

Center for Universal Education

Darrell M. West, Joseph B. Keller

February 12, 2024

Brahima Sangafowa Coulibaly, Zia Qureshi, Aloysius Uche Ordu, Arushi Sharma, Jennifer L. O’Donoghue, Rebecca Winthrop, Alexandra Bracken, John W. McArthur

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