Foundations

In parallel to the exponential growth of Internet users worldwide over the last three decades, those situations where screens and digital technology mediate learning (Bower 2019) have become increasingly common – in formal, non-formal and informal contexts. Situations of crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic, to earthquakes, through armed conflicts, to name a few, make online learning and teaching a powerful tool to ensure seamlessly education, worldwide, no matter the challenge (Affouneh & Burgos 2021).

The Web started to be used for teaching purposes on a consistent basis in 1996, bringing about new types of learning experiences and educational practices, along with a host of expectations, hopes, myths and promises that too often did not live up to the hype (Bates 2005). While online courses and HE institutions specializing in this modality of education have proliferated dramatically since then, there are important inequalities influenced by socio-economic and cultural factors in terms of who can participate and benefit from it, (Czerniewicz 2018, Eynon & Malmberg 2021). On the other side, Open Education and Open Science have increased the access ratio and diversity to content, research data, services and resources, drastically (Stracke et al. 2020).

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions and whole educational systems worldwide that had worked only on face-to-face settings had no other choice but to migrate to online settings. The main period lasted from late 2019 (mainly in China) to nowadays, in 2022, worldwide, with a specific stress in 2020 and 2021, when remote learning shifted from being a specific niche for learning anytime, anywhere, to becoming the norm. Due to the impossibility of delivering education face-to-face, educators and learners used to interacting within the boundaries of the classrooms had to quickly adapt to a new reality (Stracke et al. 2021).

The new situation revealed important competence and skill gaps, along with social and material inequalities, affecting the readiness of educators and students to fully participate in digital learning experiences. As a result of this, the transformation of educational methodology in this context has become a priority to many key stakeholders in the education sector, as evidenced by the high number of reports and initiatives launched between 2021 and 2022. These reports aimed at shaping the future of education and, in particular, addressing the role that digital resources, services, and technologies can or should play in it (e.g. Barber et al. 2021, Barosevcic et al. 2021, European Commission 2020, Facer & Selwyn 2021, Higueras et al. 2021, Huang et al. 2020).

Most likely, digital education will keep playing a more central role in the design of learning experiences in a post-pandemic world. Adopting digital education in a strategic way will require a special sensitivity towards crisis situations beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, which might overlap and unfold simultaneously. This will require more flexibility from traditional educational institutions who are used to delivering teaching offline, so that they invest more in hybrid approaches that alternate remote and on-site activities or even combine online and on-campus participants, as proposed in the HyFlex approach (Rider & Moore 2021).

The modules in this section cover key aspects that any Digital Education Strategy should take into consideration. The first module addresses the importance of providing educators and students with ways of gaining self-awareness of their digital competence level, so that they can identify both weaknesses and strengths as a first step in enhancing their ability to engage effectively and appropriately in digital education.

The second module focuses on the support to educators in developing the digital education competences that they need to design and deliver suitable learning experiences, considering the characteristics of the digital ecosystems in which their practice takes place. In a similar way, the third module explores how to support students in developing the digital skills they need to actively engage in digital education experiences and make the most of them.

The last module looks at the assessment implications of digital education, another aspect that Digital Education Strategies cannot ignore.