Text 1. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Education

 

UNESCO gives high priority to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for expanding access to quality education. The Dakar Framework for Action states that the potential of ICT should be used to help achieve Education for All (EFA) goals. According to the Medium-Term Strategy of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE), “ICTs can expand access and enhance the quality of education. However, judicious choices are essential for avoiding expensive errors that can have the opposite effect to the one intended. Monitoring progress, understanding results, but also learning by doing, are all essential to advancement” (UNESCOIITE, 2010).

 

The majority of UNESCO Member States recognize ICT as the catalyst for educational reform and innovation leading to the increase of knowledge and information accessibility, the revision of curriculum to meet the new demands of future education, teacher development, social inclusion, and further raising the quality of education.

 

ICT plays a role of equivalent importance in as much as it is the vehicle of choice by means of which knowledge is not only shared around the globe but is also returned in the form of user feed-back. Put simply, ICT helps professional educators to re-examine some of their initial assumptions about relevance, equity, and cost-effectiveness and, where necessary, to make the adjustments needed to enrich the quality of the source from which it emanated in the first place.

 

Professionals working in both the public and private sectors have, for at least the past half-century, recognized the need for coherent policies in education and indeed some of UNESCO’s most seminal work has been done in the fields of policy and financing in education. Yet it is only recently that they have come to realize that, by not including the place of ICT in education, the task is only half done. And the starting point, it is widely agreed, is the acknowledgment of the inter-connectedness of education and ICT. If education is the “what” of global knowledge and ICT, the “how”, then it follows that, together, they furnish the answer to the question “why”.

 

ICT, and ICT alone, has the capacity to provide the means by which the widely-used concept of lifelong learning has an operational meaning. Without it, the notion is little more than a noble aspiration. Without ICT, concepts like equal access to education and education for all are condemned to the fate of a slogan: however right they may be, without the means to share the knowledge generated by formal and non-formal educators, they can never be more than an empty call to promote equity and justice.

 

Rapid development of information technology helps to drive knowledge and information-based society. How to define knowledge and information-based society and what kind of trends can be expected in terms of change? In knowledge and information-based society, a new economic principle directs the society: knowledge is considered more important than any other property; knowledge and information prompt tougher competition than ever before. The demands associated with social change lead education reform.

 

Education must be able to respond to social changes and ensure adequate training of human resources to satisfy the demands of the changing society. No matter how hard we try to prepare for such changes, nobody can fully anticipate or predict changes to come.

 

Therefore, a national strategic human resources development plan for the next generation should be prepared on the basis of proper foresight. Our society is increasingly multi-disciplinary. So an individual cannot live autonomously and must be able to cooperate and collaborate with others.

 

Thus, importance of efficient and effective communication and collaborative skills becomes a critical factor in education. In order to solve the education-related problems and to respond to the new demands of the changing society, there is a need for reforming school education and the educational system on the whole. ICT use in education and e-Learning as one of its components are one of the best ways to expand educational opportunity so that students and citizens can be satisfied with education.

 

The implementation of ICT policy in education includes three stages in terms of the establishment and expansion of its usability.

 

The first phase is focused on establishing a world-class ICT infrastructure to initiate the educational information service.

 

The second phase is devoted on quality education and open access to the information related to the education and training services available within the ICT infrastructure: e-Learning and capacity building programme for teachers and CEOs of elementary and secondary schools.

 

The third phase is designed to create sustainable learning environments including mobile learning, which provides students with more flexibility and more secure education information service. This should be further developed to allow students and primary and secondary schools to use digital textbooks instead of printed textbooks.

 

The important factors that affect the success of implementation policies and initiatives of ICT and e-Learning can be summarized as follows:

• Systematic policy implementation;
• Capacity of implementing organizations;
• Implementing policy through liaison and cooperation between organizations;
• Sustainable financing of ICT in education;
• Well-established policy monitoring and evaluation systems;
• Consumer-centered policy implementation;
• Shift in policy to respond to technological and societal change.

 

 

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