Securing Digital Equity in Australian Education
The Australian Network for Quality Digital Education brings together leaders from education, government, industry, research, social purpose and philanthropic organisations, in the common purpose of ensuring that all Australian students benefit from the best edtech. The Network addresses important policy questions like quality expectations and governance and seeks to build evidence of best practice use in the classroom. The Network has a particular focus on learning from voices less frequently heard, so that edtech can respond the full diversity of needs and start to improve learning outcomes and disrupt the education divide.
The Network is hosted by the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at University of Technology Sydney, with initial support from the Paul Ramsay Foundation.
Two AIEOU collaborators, Professor Leslie Loble AM (Chair of the Network) and Dr Kelly Stephens have recently authored a report entitled, Securing Digital Equity in Australian Education.
As we all know, not all children have an equal chance to succeed at school, a pattern that persists across countries and time, and worsens as children get older. While Australian governments and school sectors have long been committed to changing this, we remain a long way from successfully addressing the inequity of student learning experiences and outcomes.
This report considers educational technology (edtech), including that powered by artificial intelligence (AI), in the context of educational inequity and disadvantage. We ask: How does equity intersect with educational technology and AI? How is the rapidly increasing prevalence of AI-enabled edtech in Australian schools likely to impact educational equity? How could it help? How might it make things worse? What can we do to tip the balance?
The report explores four dimensions of digital equity:
- Access equity and digital inclusion
- Data equity
- Designing for equity
- Equity and effective use.
The report outlines a Digital Equity Learning Guarantee to address equity across all four dimensions for edtech to realise its potential to help tackle ongoing educational disadvantage in Australia.
You can read the full report here.
