Panel Discussion
Ensuing Public Education Extends into Digital Realms: Introducing the UNESCO-UNICEF Charter for Public Digital Learning Platforms
Date Thursday, Dec 4 Time – Room: Potsdam I
What should a public digital learning platform do, who should it serve, and what principles should guide its development? These are the questions UNESCO and UNICEF answer in the new UNESCO-UNICEF Charter for Public Digital Learning Platforms. The Charter sets out a common vision for public digital platforms. It also specifies actions and approaches to ensure platforms are public, accommodating, complementary, trustworthy, inclusive, and open. Developed under the UNESCO-UNICEF Gateways Initiative with international input, the Charter will be explained at this session and, for the first time, opened to public comment.
Mark West
Lead for the Gateways Initiative and Lead for the Futures of Education, UNESCO
Mark West works in UNESCO’s Education Sector in where he researches and writes about the future of education with a special focus on technology.
He develops projects and publications that help the international community identify opportunities and risks for education in an age of accelerating digital change.
Mark currently manages a team that seeks to clarify the educational implications of mainstream and frontier digital technologies, including AI. He looks at technological integrations in education through a broad and humanistic lens, considering their impacts on individual and community health and well-being, environmental and financial sustainability, and repercussions for the quality, equity, and accessibility of learning.
Mark coordinates the joint UNESCO-UNICEF Gateways to Public Digital Learning Initiative. It works directly with countries to help them ensure that education is supported online as well as offline. The Gateways Initiative facilitates international cooperation to strengthen digital learning opportunities that are free and open to learners, teachers and families.
Mark spent much of 2020 to 2023 researching the ed-tech experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and exploring how practices and norms that emerged during this period are rippling into present and future of education. The culmination of this work is the UNESCO book 'An Ed-Tech Tragedy?'. The publication has been well received by education and technology experts as well as various news outlets, including the New York Times and the Financial Times.
Prior publications of note include 'I’d Blush if I Could' (2019); 'Reading in the Mobile Era' (2014); and 'UNESCO Guidelines for Mobile Learning' (2013).
'I'd Blush if I Could' prompted leading technology companies to make changes to the way AI voice assistants project gender. It clarified how education can help close digital gender divides and was praised by media organizations around the world.
'Reading in the Mobile Era' brought international attention to the ways governments, schools and families can leverage inexpensive mobile technologies to advance literacy.
The 'UNESCO Guidelines for Mobile Learning' helped governments understand how to leverage increasingly ubiquitous technology to expand learning opportunities and enrich the vital work that happens in schools and classrooms.
Mark West works in UNESCO’s Education Sector in where he researches and writes about the future of education with a special focus on technology.
He develops projects and publications that help the international community identify opportunities and risks for education in an age of accelerating digital change.
Frank Van Cappelle
Head of the Global Learning Innovation Hub, Global Lead for Digital Education, UNICEF