Digital Education Futures Initiative launched at Cambridge

A newly-launched University of Cambridge project aims to explore the possibilities that digital technologies have opened up in the field of education – many of which would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. The Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFI) is based at the Cambridge college, Hughes Hall, and a number of members of the Faculty of Education are involved in its core team.

DEFI aims to address a lack of systematic research examining how the technologies broadly associable with the Internet Age – such as smartphones, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and the web itself – have opened up new horizons in learning and teaching that would have been extremely difficult without them. Emerging prospects such as personalised and adaptive learning, the use of simulated environments in teaching, or working virtually with enterprises and industrial settings, offer vast transformative potential for future education. These are, however, accompanied by a host of questions and challenges: such as how to ensure security and confidentiality, how to ensure quality, equity and choice; how to encourage adoption in what remains an often-conservative sector; the limits of and future need for a physical school environment; and how to bridge the digital divide without exacerbating

In the context of these questions – and many others besides – DEFI intends to become a hub for research, discussion and thought regarding how digital technologies might, or might not, transform education in the future. Most current research on such matters has been fragmentary, and the Initiative aims to unify further enquiry by working closely with partners in industry, education and policy, as well as other academic institutions. As well as discussing the possibilities of new technology in theory, much of its work will involve design-based research projects that test its impact in real-world settings. In time, it is hoped that DEFI will become a fully-fledged Institute collaborating with a global network of partners in industry, policy and practice.

The Initiative was launched with a virtual event on Thursday, 21 January, which was attended by 350 education experts and policy-makers from around the world, and hosted by Jane Mann, Managing Director of the Cambridge Partnership for Education. The participants heard from DEFI’s Director, Rupert Wegerif, who is Professor Education at the Faculty; Andreas Schleicher, founder of the Programme for International Student Assessment and Director of the OECD Directorate of Education and Skills; Professor Mmantsetsa Marope, Executive Director of the World Heritage Group and Honorary President of the Indian Ocean Education Societies; Nick Sample, who leads the Arm School Programme; and Feiyi Zhu, Vice-President of Dipont Education.

Professor Wegerif highlighted the role of technology in the education sector’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has further emphasised the possibility of restructuring education around the new logic of digital and internet-based tools. “Those new possibilities need serious research,” he added. “There are enthusiastic voices, and there are critical voices. We hope this new centre at Cambridge can provide academic analysis and an evidence base that policy-makers will be able to use in their decision-making in this area.”

Andreas Schleicher’s presentation illustrated the importance of DEFI in the context of startling transformations in education as a result of technological change, noting in particular the complex range of online sources that young people need to navigate compared with 20 years ago, when book-based learning remained the dominant form of education. Outcomes, he observed, are not necessarily keeping pace with those changes: only one in 10 15-year-old students in the industrialised world can, for example, reliably distinguish a fact from an opinion. Added to this, he stressed the huge range of possibilities that digitisation has created and the urgent need to consider such developments with a sense of their implications for the goals and functions of education, its structures, governance and politics. COVID-19 has only increased the urgency of that need: just over 20% of education systems, in one survey of 36 countries, support a ‘return to normal scheduling and student attendance’ post-pandemic. “This is why think the work of DEFI is so important,” Mr Schleicher said. “The world is changing very rapidly, and education needs to adapt.”

Professor Marope’s presentation focused on the need to ensure that research has a real-world impact and the importance of knowledge brokerage to DEFI’s future success, while Nick Sample and Feiyi Zhu both spoke in different ways of the collaborative possibilities that digital technologies raise, between industry and educators, and by bringing Chinese and Western research and practice into closer dialogue.

One of the first DEFI projects will be a ‘Classroom Research Learning Exchange’, through which a global community of teachers will be able to share research and practice, led by Faculty members Dr Peter Dudley and Dr Sara Hennessy. Three part-time research assistants from the Faculty have also recently been appointed to work with Dr Louis Major, who is Directing the DEFI ‘Innovation Lab’, which is carrying out various exercises in evidence-mapping and horizon-scanning to analyse emerging trends and explore new models of education. Over time, the Initiative is planning many more projects, on themes such as how best to nurture and assess the skills and competencies required by 21^st century workplaces; how to build and engage a global network of stakeholders around the most pressing issues in digital technology and its impact on education; and how to grow and support emerging social enterprises and start-ups in ed-tech, including those at Cambridge itself.

Further information about DEFI can be found on the Initiative website here. A video of the launch, along with conversations with Jane Mann and the University’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education, Professor Graham Virgo, are available now on the DEFI YouTube channel.