Originally published on World Economic Forum by Marga Gual Soler Founder of SciDipGLOBAL, molecular biologist, advisor to the EU Science Diplomacy Cluster, and Komal Dadlani Biochemist and ed-tech entrepreneur. CEO/Co-founder at Lab4U,
COVID-19 has forced big changes in the way lessons are delivered.
But education worldwide needs an even more radical rethink.
Science, technology, engineering and maths are crucial to our future.
COVID-19 has forced more than 1 billion students and youth out of school, triggering the world’s biggest educational technology (edtech) implementation in history, almost overnight. Schools and universities are scrambling to redesign their teaching and learning to allow for students of all ages to study from home. While this raises huge practical and logistic issues for students, teachers and parents (especially women), it opens up a world of opportunities to reimagine what learning looks like in the 21st century.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has made digital tools indispensable. We work, learn, socialize, celebrate, and grieve virtually, and it is access to these technologies that has made it possible for many aspects of life to continue remotely, if in new forms. But the pandemic has also made life online more dangerous as cyberattacks of all stripes surge, as hackers “bomb” Zoom rooms, and as hate speech and misinformation flourish.
COVID-19 has magnified the critical role for digital technologies but also their underlying risks, and in doing so, made it clear that urgent work is needed to ensure that we can realize a future where new technologies can be harnessed to realize good and that we can work together to manage their risks.
Recently, the UN Foundation partnered with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to host a virtual discussion, featuring Fabrizio Hochschild, special adviser to the UN Secretary-General, on how the United Nations is working with others to help foster a safer and more equitable digital future.
Under-Secretary-General Hochschild explained how the UN Secretary-General’s new Roadmap for Digital Cooperation can help advance a positive digital future. The Roadmap, which was launched last month, builds on the work of the UN’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, led by Melinda Gates and Jack Ma, and which delivered its final report last year. Since then, the UN has been working in partnership with countries, the private sector, civil society, research community, and others to identify how to realize the panel’s recommendations for what they called “the age of digital interdependence.”
The result of these efforts, the Roadmap is a call to:
CONNECT those who are not yet connected;
RESPECT human rights and human agency online; and
PROTECT those who are vulnerable to harms online.
Four points emerged from the wide-ranging discussion…
Hear from Hayde Martinez, Founder and CEO of De Cero a Ciencia De Datos (From Zero to Data Science) on the machine learning as a service tools (MLaaS) she empowers students with to stay connected even when they’re apart. Code and tools: Python, Jupiter Notebook, Psychic Learn, Pandas, Numpy, TensorFlow, and machine learning as a service by cloud providers AWS and Azure. Focuses on background”: How the algorithms work, the memory, data, software, hardware – having this knowledge makes it easier to use machine learning as a service in the cloud. EDequity Executive Insights — In partnership with AAUW San Diego, De Cero a Ciencia De Datos and The Girls Code Initiative.
In Africa COVID-19 has shifted the cultural context almost beyond recognition. Suddenly previous obstacles to change are surmountable as bigger ones are overcome, and an ethos of urgent action becomes the norm.
Africa’s digital economy has accelerated, particularly with respect to e-commerce, bolstering regional resilience to the health pandemic.
But ongoing challenges will require more unified action on: new financing models, supply chain, trade, infrastructure and inclusive digital transformation.
English
Hindi
Portuguese
Spanish
Recent Comments