Education and Science, Modern EU

Digital education services have become both apparent and practically necessary during the “social isolation” forced by the COVID-19, leading to the creation of universally accessible online courses, seminars and other contents for students.  

Various apps and content are supposed to greatly improve the education quality and at the same time dramatically change the operational teaching’s structures; these dynamic trends are at the same time questioning the age-old university-student connections.

Numerous digital educational tools in a very quick developing mode are aimed at supporting students’ cognitive development and at the same time at increasing teachers’ abilities to provide analytical skills. Never before the students and educators have had such a distant but quite efficient ways of changing educational landscape with the digital online-education solutions which are critical to facilitating uninterrupted delivery of teaching services.

Through smart phones, PCs and tablets the teacher has entered each student’s home and even a pocket: there is no need to forcefully gathering students for a lecture or a seminar: he/she can listen the lecture’s audio-version at any convenient time. For thousand of universities there is no need to rent a lecture hall, for millions of students there is no anymore need to drive to a university at a certain time with a great relive for the public transport…

At the same time, the process of making the online lectures would select the most qualified lectures: those who tried to record their own lectures know what I am talking about…

The revolutionary part of modern education requires new approaches to educational premises and venues, as well as to organizational structure of the educational process. However, not all is clear at present: probably, the “socializing aspect” of education is at risk: e.g. students’ personal relations are being jeopardized due to restricted communications; the issue can be somehow resolved through chats, LinkedIn and other digital means.

Other problems include, for example: scheduling learning, instructions, control in reasonable balance, choosing learning resources on demand, nourishing learning ability with e-assessment, etc. All the above mentioned issues are expressed in a wish that more countries and universities would share their experience and suggestions to improve students’ active digital learning.  

Global efforts have been slowly directed in the right directions since the end of the last century. However, unfortunately, the UNESCO’s “Education 2030 Agenda” adopted in 2015 did not provide any guidelines concerning the distant learning, though most of the goals are serving as a good reference tool for increasing the education quality.  

More in: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000245656

In line with the digital technology’s development, UNESCO launched a global education coalition to support countries in scaling up their best online learning practices; it established the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education, IITE in 1997 with the headquarters in Moscow/Russia; it is the only UNESCO institute that holds a global mandate for ICT in education. IITE has developed its strategic priority areas to meet new demands and tasks ahead. The mission of IITE in the new era is promoting the innovative use of ICT and serving as facilitator and enabler for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) through digital solutions and best practices.

More on IITE in: https://iite.unesco.org/teacher-professional-development-ict-empowered-innovative-pedagogy/

Additional on SDG-4 teaching in: Eteris E. Teaching sustainability: modern challenges. – Lambert Acad. Publ., 2019, - 80 pp.

In: https://www.amazon.de/s?k=Eugene+Eteris&i=english-books&ref=nb_sb_noss