We're going to continue with some other UNESCO's colleagues.
I must can we thank a lot for sharing their time.
With us, Even if it's through technologies.
On my list, the are working in unicycle
and they're going to pretend UNESCO's views on the contribution
of open online and digital education to the future of education.
So our first speakers in a group,
she's a program specialist in the Digital Innovation
and Transformation section
of the Communications and Information Sector on Unicycle.
Two quarters in Paris,
she's responsible for the implementation of the UNESCO's.
All your recommendation and related all are dynamic Coalition
and the Unit school Eyesight competency framework for teachers, as
well as initiatives in open distance, flexible and online education.
She was responsible officer for the publication
Learning for All guidelines for the inclusion of learners
with disabilities in open and distance learning and
in UNESCO's.
So I think, well, she's a great représentent
of the things we are talking about this afternoon and all these day here
with our own this co-chair
so seen it had the floor is yours and thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
And thank you for the kind invitation to join this discussion.
I would like to share my screen.
I'm going to speak to you today about UNESCO's instrument.
It's the only UNESCO's instrument in the area of digital education and
and digital education.
And it's the UNESCO's 2019 recommendation on OCR.
I just share my screen.
Here we go.
Do you see my screen? Sure.
Do you see it?
Is it okay?
Yeah, I think so. The.
So you also see that I have the screen, the
let me see.
I have the transcript going.
So that's kind of strange. Okay, let's go.
All right.
So the recommendation on OCR is a UNESCO's normative instrument.
It's an instrument that is
agreed upon by 193 member states down to the last comma.
It was adopted in 2019 at UNESCO's General Conference.
And it is
it has
a very clear definition of what we're talking about.
It's about open educational resources.
So these are educational resources that are under a public domain
or a copyright that allows for open license,
that allows for low cost access.
We use repurposing and redistribution by others.
And there is a definition of an open license that you see on the screen.
And thus, just to be clear, just for our discussion of what
we're talking about, we're really talking
about openly licensed educational materials.
And the stakeholders of this recommendation are very large.
You see it on the screen here.
It's the educational community.
It's the higher educational community, of course.
And higher education is where this movement started
in 2002 with M.I.T., but it's grown exponentially.
And now with this, with this normative instrument, it's
on the vocabulary of all UNESCO's member states, 194 member states,
which will which report on it every four years.
And in addition, you have the knowledge community,
if you like, of information, communication, technology
professionals, publishers, public and private sectors
and media broadcasting groups, as you see.
And we also have cultural institutions,
a very important partner.
And I think for higher education, also our libraries, especially
in today's world where knowledge is growing very quickly
and the role of libraries for the curation of knowledge is highlighted
inside the text.
It's very, very straightforward.
It touches five areas of action capacity building.
So the issues you see on the screen
and the basic principle is that stakeholders
should have the skills to be able to understand its added value
and to be able to actually create access.
We use redistribute it Well, we are there is a reference
to openly licensed platforms and we've seen that since COVID
that this has become really very, very pronounced
as an international need
and then interoperate and metadata and standards.
In terms of policy, the first thing in the policy area is the principle.
Well, that means that citizens
and countries, taxpayers pay taxes to the government.
The government there.
Then when they use when they use public money to provide
educational resources, these resources
should be made available for free on an open license.
So the principle of avoiding double jeopardy that the citizens shouldn't
have to pay two times for the same, same good,
and then issues of procurement models that reflect the need
for open licensing and then incentives and guidelines
to support open licensing and then alignment to other open
post licensing policies such as open data, open science.
As many of you know, there is another recommendation
that UNESCO's adopted in 2021 on Open Science,
and in this recommendation there is also a reference
to the OCR recommendation that this is a means
for capacity building in open science as well as in many other areas.
There's also the area of data protection.
The third area is on quality multilingualism.
The fact that there is a need for we are to be developed in all languages
and not just the most commonly used ones which are English and Chinese,
that should be made accessible for persons with disabilities
and that there should be investments in infrastructure.
And that the quality issue, of course, in that we're speaking
to already I'm speaking to here at the higher education community,
which is the where quality assurance is put is the key component
and that the quality assurance should be
the same, if not better than for non we are.
So copyright IT materials
sustainability in a nutshell is that the cost of the materials
should not be shouldered by the learners and the teachers
and that there should be incentives for stakeholders to use.
We are international collaboration.
Is that all of this for other issues which I just mentioned,
should really benefit from cooperation,
whether it be international inter regional interest, sectoral, inter
sectional, whatever.
But it has to.
It's a question of building knowledge together
and sharing knowledge together.
We have in this
regard launched the Air Dynamic Coalition.
This is a coalition of members and I saw in the
in the list of participants here, we have a lot of people
who are part of this.
So we are dynamic coaches in including some of the speakers
and this this
this coalition is
a means for stakeholders all the stakeholders
which I just presented to be able to share information
on joint activities and to collaborate on joint activities.
We have an advisory group.
I think we have a speaker here.
I tell them who's part of the advisory group
of this dynamic coalition,
and we have a lot of different joint activities.
We've had, I think 50 activities in the last 24 months,
a number of publications, a lot of different updates
and also a means for colleagues to
to be in touch with one another
and to share information on upcoming events
that their organizations may be doing.
This is just a means of keeping the community alive.
It was recognized as an intern, as an official Internet Governance Forum.
This is a multilateral stakeholder mechanism set up by the U.N.
So it's its reaches is expand.
Since it was launched into 20 just after the
the adoption of this recommendation and just
literally hours before
all of France and most of the world shut down.
So it's there.
So what's the added value? What's the point?
The point is that it's an normative instrument.
It's something that's very useful for higher education institutions
because it gives them a framework
to collaborate and build knowledge together and it's very important for
from a lifelong learning perspective and from a knowledge perspective.
And it's part of it's it's fueled
by an international community that is there to share resources.
It's a sustainable ecosystem.
There's content design, they're platforms, there's policy guidelines.
There is there are ways for it to maintain itself.
And I think in the group that's here today, I saw that we have a goal
and of course we have till the MEU and we have fuzzy
and I'm sure that they're going to speak about the
the network of chairs actually that was established
for open education of which we are, is a key component.
So it is really a very, very dynamic,
no pun intended mechanism
for building knowledge societies
and also links to the, you know, what, you know, U.N.
secretary general report
on digital cooperation, which came out a couple of years ago.
And it is open educational resources
by definition are digital public goods.
They adhere to privacy and other applicable
international domestic laws, best practices, and do no harm.
And they're based on open standards and open content.
So this is a digital public good and it is part of a larger
inter-governmental framework, which is
which is a
the our common agenda of the secretary general.
And it's
it's it is part of the digital compact,
which is this part in yellow here and it's talks about the digital
commons is a global public good and it's a contribution
to these these U.N. frameworks.
And the reason that is important
is because it's part of a global commitment
to achieving the sustainable Development Goals.
And it is a reflection of what is happening
using the digital to achieve these
these goals
you have here my email and also a link here,
and I'll put it into the chat if it's possible.
And this is a link to join the Dynamic Coalition.
It is open.
It's for open educational resources open.
Everyone is welcome
and we'd like to encourage you to join us and we share information on
on what's happening.
And we also share information on different projects of its partners.
If you want to share information
on what you're doing, you're quite welcome to.
We'd be very honored.
So with that, I thank you very much for inviting me to speak and
Sure. And
thank you very much, Zainab.
I'm going to give the floor to Mark West first
and then we can have some questions.
If there are some questions here in the room or in the chat.
Right.
So Mark West is the next speaker.
He's project officer
in future of learning and innovation education sector of UNESCO's.
He is an education expert.
Examine ways for technology to improve the equity, equality
and accessible accessibility of learning.
He coordinates the Unit School and UNICEF Joint Initiative gateways
to public digital learning,
and he develops projects and publications to help establish new
and more human centered trajectories for the location in a digital age.
So Mark had The floor is yours and after you
you both participation we can make some questions.
But great thank you very much.
A pleasure to be here and a pleasure to follow my my colleagues
Franciscan and then a
I'm going
to just given the focus to this.
I was just going to sort of try to use our short time together to share
sort of four ideas that I think are a bit unusual about the future
of education and a world of AI, and just some perspectives
that Ionesco has elaborated in various public actions,
speeches, think pieces and other documents
and sort of bring those into our discussion.
And then I'll also share a few words about an initiative
that we are running that builds very much on UNESCO's long
work on open educational resources that Zeynep reviewed.
This is an initiative we co-run with
UNICEF called the Gateways to Public Digital Learning.
So again, share kind of four
big ideas, and then we'll speak briefly
about gateways to public digital learning.
The initiative run by UNESCO's UNICEF. So
onto the four
ideas, the sort of idea number one,
I think important
sort of observation that we have had over the past few years
is that we're seeing quite a lot of automation in education.
And while some of that automation of courses is very exciting,
things like accessing personalized tutors, getting access to,
you know, various personalized learning things,
a lot of that is sort of very automated.
It's controlled by machines and it doesn't involve a lot of human
to human interaction.
In the past, looking back maybe two decades ago,
even a decade ago,
the sort of prevalence of of technology, of edtech
inside of educational institutions, whether those were universities
or schools, was often a marker of of privilege.
If you were using computers, often,
that was sort of meant to kind of put you ahead.
But I think we're beginning to see something of a transition now
where a lot of automation is being directed
towards some of the most underprivileged learners schools,
most under-resourced sort of teachers,
where as a lot of the human exchange involved in education
is benefiting privileged learners.
Take, for instance, some, you know, very wealthy city centers,
whether that's here in Paris, where UNESCO's located
and other city centers and in in Europe and whether London
or Berlin or in the United States, San Francisco, but also in
all over the world.
Some of the best schools now sort of feature
that they won't be using technology very often.
And that's sort of a selling point
for a sort of premier education
with an understanding that that technology will be used
sort of in life and outside of school or in the margins of education.
And then we're seeing a lot of the discussion around AI that
this is going to be a solution for some of the most under-resourced
areas of the world.
So I think this is a sort of shift to be pay attention to.
But this discourse of sort of edtech for for them for underprivileged
learners, but, you know, schools and teachers for us.
So I think this is something to kind of keep in mind and
definitely notice that this
this discourse is sort of as grown with some of the excitement
and enthusiasm around AI for education.
Idea number two is just to sort of observe.
And as UNESCO's school has done, the speed
of the rollout of these applications and technologies
for use in formal school settings
and for use by minors,
we have observed that it's difficult
to think of any other sort of novel technology
that is launched, rolled out sort of poorly understood
and is being used at schools and universities
just weeks later.
Again, not to underplayed the the
the positive potentials of these tools,
but it is also to observe that for most educational resources
headed for use in formal school
settings are usually judged against a few major criteria.
Those criteria include, for instance,
the accuracy of the educational resources,
the age appropriateness of the resources,
the cultural appropriateness of the resources
and the sort of pedagogical suitability of those resources.
Now, if we hold, you know, a very generic, generative
AI tool like CBT or others like it against those criteria,
they often would not meet any of those four criteria
as they're not necessarily age appropriate.
The pedagogical suitability can be questionable.
We all know the issues around accuracy.
So it's just to say that we do have a lot of existing
criteria that can help us to measure the suitability of these tools.
Those are not always being applied
and have mentioned that this is this is important to apply,
especially I think, when it involves children and minors who we have seen
sort of experiments where these new novel technologies and tools
were rolled out for use by minors without any sort of regulations,
with with very little guidance, with very little sort of,
you know, policies to govern their use.
And we're sort of seeing some of the costs of that.
And I'm speaking, I think Exhibit A here is is social media
and some of the negative effects that that has have
have become very apparent with with children and minors.
And we would certainly want to avoid that with these new technologies,
which we know can be engines of persuasion, vision
and even manipulation, if not well governed.
The next
slide I wanted to share, if I can, here it is,
is this idea about the diversity of our knowledge systems.
You know, UNESCO's sort of a celebration of our many ways of of
knowing, of thinking of approaching sort of problems.
There are lots of different knowledge systems.
Technology has long promised to help expand
our knowledge systems, to reinforce existing knowledge systems.
But I think it's fair to observe that some of the practical applications
of these technologies indeed risk narrowing our our knowledge systems.
Let me provide just a sort of very practical example.
Google, for instance, when it you know, years ago
Google would just surface, you know, 20 results in response to a search.
So you would see sort of 20 results on on page one.
And you could go to page two, page three, page four and so forth.
But it was sort of a menu of options to look at.
We have seen that
those the number of those options at least presented on the first page.
And that's significant because very few people navigate to a
to a second or third page, but will sort of scan
the first page of results have sort of thinned.
And again, it's it's a changing scenario, but often
they're presenting only sort of ten options in front of users.
And today with the new integration of of
AI technologies, Google is very prominently
featuring just one response to your your query.
I think this is very significant, this sort of forced initial selection
that's really right there.
Of course, this has a convenience factor,
but it is maybe limiting our sort of exposure
to these diverse ways of knowing and thinking.
We also look at applications like the generative chat bots
that so many people are using
and we need to observe that a system like Chatty Beauty,
it is not giving users a sort of menu of options, not necessarily.
It's often sort of giving a singular response.
Sometimes that singular response
can be nuanced and say there are many views about this,
but it is nevertheless a sort of singular option.
And that singular option does not trace to human minds,
but rather to very complex,
you know, mathematical probability and other things that generate
that particular response that doesn't trace to human minds.
So I think we need to be alert to the ways that these technologies
could, in fact, narrow our knowledge commons and even lead to sort of,
you know, the power of of Google is nobody questions
but if everybody is is using chat beauty for knowledge tasks you know
it would have tremendous power over over knowledge tasks and work.
So I think anyway that's something to think about.
But we are also seeing a diversity of applications of, of, of AI models.
And I think that's something to to welcome final point
point number four here is around investments in education.
And this is just to observe that,
you know, in the recent past, if you worried about, you know,
money was going to be spent
on on teaching and learning, on training, on coaching,
did that involved human beings almost, you know, automatically
today that's not necessarily the case.
And we are seeing, you know, huge investments in public resources
being pumped into the development and the training
of machine intelligence, of artificial intelligence.
And we know that this is a site of competition
between nations, of course, between corporations,
but but also increasingly between, you know, countries themselves.
And this is just to observe that I think going forward,
there are a lot of calls to step up, public investment
to build, you know, machines that can read and write.
And I think even to a certain extent to help us solve problems.
And we're going to have to balance that, of course, with our investments
to train human human beings.
We live in a world as many know that over
700 million people in the world today are illiterate.
We have well over over 250 million
students who are out of school in this current environment.
So I think it's not to say that this is an either or choice, but
we are looking at where we will have to make difficult decisions
about where to pour money into into education.
And while I'm very excited about A.I.
technology, technology
that can read and write and respond to knowledge queries,
I'm more excited about people that can can read and write.
So this is another idea I just wanted to bring in.
Then finally, I just wanted to very briefly touch
on our gateways to Public Digital Learning initiative.
And this is just
an initiative that responds to what we noticed
before and especially during COVID 19,
which was that
there were a lot of people who had devices, who had
who had, you know, they had good connectivity,
they had even good digital skills, but they didn't necessarily
have access to good learning content that was aligned
with their curriculum.
So in a lot of countries, that might mean
seventh grade students or 11th grade students didn't understand where
they should go to get curriculum aligned kind of learning resources
and make progress in in education in different subjects.
There were sort of a multiplicity of platforms,
many of them offered by private sector companies, many of them
reliant on advertising for their business
model or data extraction for their business model.
And there just was not a sort of public
digital space for public education.
Gateways is an initiative to try to help address this
and ensure that when education crosses into the digital realm,
it indeed stays sort of public and that education remains a human
right even when it crosses that digital line.
So, you know, school and UNICEF are working with countries
to help them to develop, strengthen
and improve their public digital learning platforms.
So that's what Gateways is all about.
And to do this, we will be doing a mapping of public
digital learning platforms in different countries so that
at the
end of 2024, we hope to have a map up where you can look and see
what the public digital learning
platforms are in different countries, sort of
how they work, their strengths, maybe some of their limitations.
And then we're also establishing a co-operative network
of focal points inside of ministries of education and responsible
for these platforms to kind of help to share knowledge
and experience and even resources about how to strengthen
these these public platforms for for, for learning obviously
open educational resources or, you know, our foundational tool
to this effort, which is which is an iPad presented.
So again, we're working with these countries to help ensure
that there are public places for public education online.
So I'll stop there.
And anyway, and thanks again for the opportunity.
Thank you very much to both of you
and Mark for being with us, as it were, representatives of UNESCO's.
Today, India's
unique culture and meetings on open, digital and distance education.
So I think your contribution has been have been really
interesting for us.
We have run out of time.
We would like like a lot of time.
And so we don't have time for questions now,
I think unless there is any in the chat.
No. Okay.
So just a final,
final thought about that.
Maybe, you know, school will need to update
this or recommendations of
2019, introduce an AI generative AI.
And as the
creator of opening additional resources,
we will need to see what happens
when you start to create open educational resources
and how to use this new way of producing open content.
But I think while we will have a roundtable afterwards
and all the speakers, the next two speakers are waiting to please,
you can come here.
And so again, thank you very much to both of you for being with us.