Digital transformation is about applying the benefits of data and technology to enhance organisations’ core business operations to meet customer needs, with the agility to adapt to change — in this case, applied to the education systems of the world.
The target customers for education systems are, of course, students, teachers, staff, and alumni. The core business operations must enhance the customer experience of all of these groups, and revolve around the education platform, the learning environment, the teaching methods, and the campus environment.
Operations in all of these areas require infrastructure and governance to connect them. At the national level, Ministries of Education (MoEs) formulate and implement education policies on education structure, curriculum, methods, and assessment. Typically, their vision is to ensure that their citizens have equal opportunities to reach their potential, live more fulfilled lives, create a more productive economy, and alleviate poverty. These MoEs also regulate and oversee the management and development of public and private education providers, from primary to university levels.
Building a New Education Platform
For MoEs to carry out these duties, they need data from the education providers about the students, the teachers, the curriculum, and the assessment results. Each student, teacher, and member of staff requires a digital identity so that their progress, development, and assessment can be measured against national Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
If a national curriculum is provided, it can be published online for all education providers that are enrolled to access. In order to manage all this data, a national education platform is required to process it and provide strategic governance and planning to achieve their objectives.
In essence, the education platform consists of national infrastructure connectivity between the education providers, high speed national and international networks for sharing resources and scientific research, a cloud platform to process data, store Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), host all the required applications as well as support analytics and reporting.
The digital transformation of a national education systems starts with analysing the capabilities of the existing education platform, identifying its shortcomings. Here, a long-term agile, cloud-based platform that can adapt to ever-changing needs with data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities will be helpful. An ecosystem of both local and international partners is also required, to provide curriculum content and smart applications as required.
Learning Environments Are Beginning to Look Very Different
With the increased use of remote and online classes and video conferencing applications, now is the time to implement national solutions and use eClassrooms to transform the ways students are taught. Teachers in traditional classrooms can simultaneously broadcast to remote branch eClassrooms to reach more students, while maintaining the interactive aspect of teaching. Products such as HUAWEI IdeaHub— an interactive digital whiteboard for video conferencing, writing, drawing, and sharing, can help with this.
Technology can allow teachers to focus on teaching to make classrooms – remote or otherwise – more effective. This also applies to school and university education, providing more cost-effective remote education.
The next level of evolution of the learning environment centers on Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), which create a virtual and interactive platform for students and teachers to interact, either on site or remotely. These technologies can make the teaching and virtual lab experiences of complex concepts easier by immersing the students in an interactive audio-visual 3D experience.
At the national level, the communication infrastructure would have to be upgraded to cater for the increased use of bandwidth, and move toward wireless coverage everywhere by implementing 5G and Wi-Fi 6 technology.
