What Does Equal Access To Education Mean In The Digital Age?

The COVID-19 crisis, and the impact which it has had on learning across the world, have highlighted many of the digital disparities which exist in today’s world.

At a time when many of the world’s students shifted from physical to digital, we were also faced with the hard truth that today there are still 3.6 billion people in the world who are unconnected. 

For students in the connected half of the world, the story is much different. While 1.2 billion children were affected by school closures across much of the world, our recent Consumer COVID-19 report found that students were able to substitute physical learning by spending 230 percent more time on digital learning tools such as Google Class, Epic! and Seesaw Class. 

The State of Broadband 2020 report estimates that there are twice as many people today who use the Internet compared to 2010.

his rise in digital literacy, together with the imminent period of rapid digitalization of the economy, means that ensuring fair and equal access to both education and future job markets will rest on the extent of digital inclusion within our societies. 

What is digital inclusion and why is it so important today? 

Today, technology plays a much bigger role in the quality and scope of how we learn, such as new digital learning platforms which are estimated to reach 350 billion USD by 2025; what we learn, with a growing emphasis on programming, robotics, AI, and automation; and how we can use it in the job market, with digital skillsets increasingly becoming a prerequisite of tomorrow’s workforce. 

The changes which are happening today show the disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. If you are not connected, that shows you the leap which you have to make between the connectivity aspect, access to education, and benefits that are derived from that. 

Closing this digital divide, with those who are not connected or not considered to be digitally literate, is imperative to ensuring a fair distribution of digital opportunities across countries, locations, gender, socioeconomic status, and age. 

Access to education in the digital age 

In 2010, we co-founded the Connect To Learn initiative with the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Millennium Promise, with a focus on delivering connectivity and ICT tools to enhance teaching and learning in unconnected, underprivileged, and largely unrepresented communities. 

Since our first projects in the Millennium Villages, we’ve helped to connect and increase the digital inclusion of more than 200,000 students worldwide. As the program has evolved, we have increased our efforts to close the digital divide not just in terms of connectivity, but from a content, syllabus, and platform side which is fundamental. 

As a technology company, we quickly discovered that we can offer so much more than connectivity, but furthermore can help improve learning processes and methodologies so learning can