The Right to a Digital Education

The potential of digital education, particularly driven by the 2020 pandemic, has launched a serious reconsideration of the individual and collective dimension of the teaching and learning processes, the timing of learning, the new ways to structure information for knowledge construction and the duties and competences of teachers and learners.

This process has become more visible in higher education (in universities) than in the more elementary educational levels, where the pace of teaching progression has not been so perceptible.

In this new pedagogical framework, teachers change and enhance their role; they have to get involved and take on a new role in order to maintain and develop quality pedagogical competence, deepen their skills and knowledge and take on new roles linked to digital technology, the internet and change.

Education has undergone (and is undergoing) an unprecedented transformation over the last two decades, especially in its working methods and in the information and communication potential at its disposal. The speed with which these changes are taking place and the development and acquisition of new competences and technical skills demand, from the educational administration, innovative and appropriate responses to the times.

The recognition of the right to digital education comes into being in this context of profound transformation in which information and communication technology plays a decisive role in the innovation of teaching functions, as well as in the approach to research. In their design and use, information and communication technologies (ICTs) make it possible to customize the steps to knowledge access. Alternatives, such as multimedia teaching, blended learning or online learning, together with classroom work and distance learning, reduce or eliminate the limitations of space and time imposed by conventional teaching. The result is that learning profits from all the resources of digital technology, especially the internet, by overcoming space and time limitations.

In this digital scenario, the right to digital education is recognized and guaranteed, leading to a transformation of teaching models, routines and ways of learning and working that based their pedagogical strategies on models that are now superseded.

Hence, the pedagogical training of teachers in ICT and its constant updating becomes one of the key factors for both formal and informal training systems. This implies the construction of a different pedagogy supported by these new resources, which enables and integrates the local with the global and makes training in educational centers compatible with the constitution of specialized telematic networks, which construct and reconstruct knowledge in all scientific and academic fields. This potential must be channeled through new models and forms of pedagogical management that will enable the exploitation of interactive possibilities of virtual space.

The evident and progressive implementation of digital models in the classroom over the last 25 years must culminate in a process whereby legislators explicitly recognize the right to digital education as a suitable means of guaranteeing the full insertion of students in the information society.