Session
Organizer 1: Hartmut Richard Glaser, Brazilian Internet Steering Committee - CGI.br
Organizer 2: Juliano Cappi, NIC.br
Organizer 3: Alexandre Costa Barbosa, NIC.br / CGI.br
Organizer 4: Jean Carlos Ferreira dos Santos, NIC.br
Organizer 5: Rafael Evangelista, University of Campinas - Unicamp
Organizer 6: Everton T Rodrigues, NIC.br
Speaker 1: Miruk Alemu, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 2: Axel Rivas, Intergovernmental Organization, Intergovernmental Organization
Speaker 3: Saraubh Chopra, Private Sector, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 4: Priscila Gonsales, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Rafael Evangelista, Technical Community, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Alexandre Costa Barbosa, Technical Community, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Jean Carlos Ferreira dos Santos, Technical Community, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Round Table - Circle - 90 Min
Could a regulatory approach to digital education platforms as infrastructures promote scientific autonomy and development?
What kind of digital education governance is required to ensure that the public interest of education and science prevail?
How to establish good practices to develop digital education infrastructure which guarantee the right to privacy and data protection for scientific purposes?
Connection with previous Messages: There was no specific session on digital education platforms in the previous IGF. However, CGI.br conducted a workshop on Platform Regulation from a Global South perspective at the IGF2021 that will also be a building block for this proposal. The need of interpreting sector-specific platforms with special attention were highlighted during the session discussion. Moreover, since the scope definition of Platform Regulation shall consider infrastructural power performed by some digital platforms. Regarding particularly the Katowice Messages, this workshop proposal is directly related to at least two. First, the message related to Meaningful Access, which say that “many countries are faced with a lack of devices, weak infrastructure and low levels of digital literacy and digital skills”), since it will discuss how the local development of digital platforms are prerequisites for promoting digital literacy. Moreover, the workshop will take into consideration the lack of access to infrastructure, devices and knowledge as key enablers of an appropriate online learning. Second, the message regarding “Emerging Regulation” and “Digital Sovereignty”, that stated that the discussions on digital sovereignty should “concentrate the discussions at the individual level within the digital realm”, but we intend to demonstrate that some specific sectors must be considered in a macro-level.
4. Quality Education
4.4
4.7
9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
9.1
9.2
9.5
Targets: Since the workshop will focus on digital educational platforms, it is directly related to SDG 4 Precisely, it will foment the development of digital skill to enable the development and management of digital platforms at the local-level, crucial to ensure relevant access to decent work and effective learning environments (Targets 4.4 and 4.7a). Additionally, since Internet literacy should combine data, media and technology literacies to act at a global scale, the workshop will also contribute to promote education for sustainable development (Target 4.7). To make it thrive, it is key to promote teaching training and international cooperation in developing countries (Target 4.7c).
Furthermore, the workshop will approach digital educational platforms as infrastructure, hence SDG 9 will be also addressed. Moreover, scientific autonomy shall be supported by reliable, sustainable and resilient infrastructure (Target 9.1). These principles are key to promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization (Target 9.2) at the digital sphere. Moreover, the purpose of discussing and improving digital education governance models is key to enhance scientific research and upgrade technological capabilities, in particular developing countries, to encourage domestic innovation and technology development (Target 9.5, 9.5B). Finally, by enabling the development of platforms and the responsible data sharing among education institutions the workshop will contribute to increase meaningful access to ICT (Target 9.5C).
Description:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of digital platforms in education gained visibility, fostering the debate on the challenges to deploy digital technologies in schools and universities around the globe. With the growing process of platformization, understood here as the fast and massive adoption of digital platforms, in education, the protection of fundamental rights in the data economy became a challenge. Regarding the educational ecosystem, schools and research institutions are faced with the need to rethink their traditional infrastructures. At the same time, there is a broader challenge posed to society in the sense of seeking a technological development that privileges education as a human right. In addition, data has been perceived as the raw material for digital-led innovation processes and, therefore, the adoption of private digital platforms in universities and schools is meant to reach a global level. Therefore there is a need to strengthen approaches to digital education platforms, which foster technological sovereignty, transparency, and ethical use of data. These guidelines could be assessed within the scope of digital sovereignty, and scientific and technological autonomy. Therefore, Internet Governance agenda should promote a multistakeholder debate to underpin the development and maintenance of digital education platforms based on those principles.
UNESCO published last year a report assuming that the use of platforms for education became a global reality, but it still needs to be improved and universalized. Moreover, the report suggested that platforms can open up a new field of possibilities for public policies aimed at expanding the right to education. However, the document indicates there is still not enough knowledge about the impact of using platforms given the right of access to quality education, hence precaution is required. The concentration of power in a very small group of companies collecting and keeping user data for monitoring, and controlling, either by the companies themselves or by the governmental authorities is critical, especially in the education and scientific sector. It is a kind of power characterized as infrastructural (European Union Observatory on the online platform economy, 2021).
Some digital platforms have become essential infrastructures for digital citizenship (Guggenberger, 2020) and educational platforms are certainly one of those. Hence they deserve particular attention from the Internet community for at least two major reasons. On one hand, the treatment of scientific data is critical in terms of national sovereignty and control of strategic information. On the other hand, education provision can be enhanced by the use of those platforms in terms of customized teaching dynamics enabled by predictions and optimizations of data-led techniques and hence influence the learning process. Added to these issues, it is worth mentioning that the outsourcing of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) services to foreign private companies discourages the technical training of professional public managers and students and, consequently, the technological development of a country, making it increasingly dependent on foreign technology and human capacity. Furthermore, this outsourcing still obliges the citizen, when exercising a right such as access to education, to adhere compulsorily to a private market, risking to lose control of their own personal and sensitive data.
Considering these concerns and the exponential growth in the offer of digital platforms to public teaching and research institutions, this workshop will explore models of digital education governance and the potential of regulating certain digital education platforms as infrastructures (Busch, 2021). Among those, it will analyse the contractual asymmetries between the companies that currently are potentially able to provide access to a large amount of data and some requirements for scientific autonomy and quality of education. The focus will be on high-level education, but the workshop will also address some aspects of basic education.
The proposed session is part of the actions and activities within a permanent and continued work under the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee - CGI.br, which has a specific working group focused on the discussions related to Educational Platforms. The session will be an exploratory one focused on gathering diverse perspectives on platformization of education and how different regions and sectors are governing the development, adoption and use of these digital platforms.
As an expected outcome, the workshop intends to list down consensual guidelines to improve the use of digital educational platforms, observing the protection of fundamental rights, the advancement of technological and scientific autonomy, and data autonomy in this sector and the improvement of the regulatory framework for the use of private platforms in education. One of those potential agreements is the need to regulate digital educational platforms as infrastructures.
The outcomes will be used during a set of workshops that will be held in Brazil in March and April of 2023 to develop a multistakeholder agenda for the promotion of digital educational platforms that shall be shared with international peers.
Hybrid Format: The workshop session will be divided in three parts. Firstly, it will consist on speakers exposing their views and experiences on digital educational platforms giving particular attention to governance challenges and mitigation strategies. The session will count with on-site and a online moderators, and also an on-site facilitator. Online attendees will be encouraged to share their examples and experiences that will be reported to the on-site moderator. Secondly, it will consist of a short debate among the extent to which and how digital educational platforms are performing infrastructural roles and which are the risks for quality of education and scientific autonomy. During the session, the on-site moderator will be responsible for organizing the interventions and interacting with the speakers to ensure that the goals of the session will be addressed. The online moderator will be the one taking care of the flow within all the online tools involved with the session, as well as read, select and guarantee that the on-site moderator will be aware of questions and comments received by the remote audience (Zoom Chat and Q&A, Hashtags in social networks like Twitter, among others). Finally, the rapporteur will list and communicate all the potential consensus regarding the development, adoption and use of digital platforms in education and another round of validation will take place among both online and on-site speakers.
Usage of IGF Official Tool.