Digital technologies can both continue and revolutionize efforts toward social inclusion and sustainable development through education. While technologies provide new opportunities, ensuring equal access and avoiding further exclusion will be important. Education has a key role to play in creating a more just, peaceful and sustainable world by empowering individuals and societies with knowledge and skills through approaches that integrate social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability.

1. Sustainable development goals and
digital inclusion
Alan Tait
Professor of Distance Education and Development,
The Open University
Visiting Professor, Aalborg University
alan.tait@open.ac.uk

2. Digital –Dialogic – Democratic - Development

3. Structure
• Inclusion: what is it?
• Digital: continuity and revolution?
• Democratic and dialogic: supported by digital?
• Development: how to define?
• Sustainable: what does it mean for education?

5. Social inclusion: why?
• A model of social inclusion
‘The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate’
1848, Mrs Cecil Alexander, hymn for the Church of England
• Also in 1848: Revolutions in Italy, France, Germany, Denmark,
Hungary etc.
• Movement towards democracy began to diminish expectation in
Europe that poor could only expect to be poor

6. Education, democracy and inclusion in
England
• Trades Unions legalised: 1824
• Non-Church of England students permitted entry to Oxford and Cambridge
Universities: 1854/5
• Universal primary education: 1880
• Women allowed to own property: 1882
• Universal secondary education (up to 14 ): 1918
• Votes for all men: 1918
• Votes for all women: 1928
• Race Relations Act (outlawed discrimination on grounds of colour or race): 1965
• Sexual Offences Act (decriminalised ‘homosexual acts’): 1967
• Sex Discrimination Act: 1975
• ‘Reasonable adjustment’ for disabled people in workplace: 1995
• Repeal of ‘Section 28’ law forbidding teaching of acceptability of homosexuality:
2003
• Gay marriage permitted: 2014

7. 1819: Peterloo massacre: image 1

8. Peterloo massacre: image 2

9. University of London
• 1828: University of London first to be open to
all religious denominations
• 1858: University of London External Studies:
first university to be open to place
• 1878: University of London: first university to
be open to women taking degrees

10. Distance education and politics
• Soviet Correspondence system
• Open University UK
• UNED, Spain
• Open University of China

11. Student support in distance and online
education
• 1970 on from elite to mass Higher Education
system in Europe
• 2015-2030 Higher Education planned to
expand by ? places
• ‘democratic and dialogic’

12. Guided didactic conversation
• Borje Holmberg of Hermods, and
Fernuniversität, Germany, 1960’s
• Correspondence teaching as new educational
practice
• Scaffolding of student learning through
written interaction
• Empathy
• Fiction in 18th century: empathy for lives of
others

13. Transactional distance
• Michael Moore, Pennsylvania State University,
1971
• The separation of learner and teacher in
distance education creates a psychological and
communications space that has to be crossed
to avoid misunderstanding and isolation
• Interaction and role of tutor to diminish
transactional distance

14. Behaviourism and programmed
learning
• Romiszowski 1970’s
• Perfectly designed learning materials would
channel learners without difficulty
• ‘auto-instructional systems’
• No need for student support
• Battle of ideas at Open University in 1970’s

15. Student support at the Open
University
• Tait 1990
• 3 dimensions to student support
• Cognitive
• Affective
• Systemic
• Tutor role in mediation of course materials, to
support individual and local engagement
• Tutor role to mitigate potential ideology of mass-
produced course materials

16. Constructivism
• Vygotsky’s ideas from 1930’s
• From 1990’s in ODEL literature
• Construction of learning by student
• Tutor role in scaffolding learning, facilitating
learning
• Tutor role is essential element, not marginal

17. Connectionism
• Manuel Castells
• Rise of the Networked Society 1996
• More widely from 2005 with World wide web
• Web replicates neural networks
• Learning through resources and
communications potential of web
• Pluralism of ideas implicit in Connectionism
• Tutor role is skilled facilitator and guide

18. World Bank on social inclusion
• Social inclusion aims to empower poor and
marginalized people to take advantage of
burgeoning global opportunities.
• It ensures that people have a voice in decisions
which affect their lives
• that they enjoy equal access to markets, services
and political, social and physical spaces.
• http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/socialdevelopment/brief/social-inclusion

19. Inclusion
• Openness: a step forward
• Positive programmes of action to include
‘outreach’
• Affirmative action: preference given to
minorities
• Granted or conceded?
• Rights or permissions?
• Outcome of struggles and campaigns

20. The library of Alexandria
3rd century BCE

21. The book: technology for mobile
learning
21

22. The transition to the mobile world,:
decentering learning
22

23. Education and technology: a long
marriage
• Technology has supported learning for 5000 years
• has always reshaped human experience and
understanding
• Is now reshaping society as fundamentally as
industrialisation in England in the early 19th
century
• Has potential for much good and some bad

24. Specific to the digital revolution in
education
Resources
• News
• Libraries
• Archives
• Markets
• Services
• Audio and video
• Citizen and peer produced
Communications
• Flexible
• Mobile – with 4G and wifi
• Immediate and
asynchronous
• Networks
• Social networks
• Local-national-global
• Access and inclusion
• Exclusion: poor-rural-elderly

25. Innovation

26. Development
• Purposeful intervention for change in society
for ethical purposes
• Inclusion rests on values, ethical and political

27. Education and Sustainability
• MDG’s: reduce poverty and hunger; achieve
universal primary education; promote gender
equality; reduce child and maternal deaths;
combat HIV, malaria and other diseases;
ensure environmental sustainability; develop
global partnerships.
• Considerable progress, by no means complete
• For poor countries

28. MDG 2: achieve universal primary
education for girls and boys
• By 2012 gender participation rates had been achieved in all
developing regions
• Critique: participation not quality has been focus
• 200-2012: primary participation increased from 83-90% in
developing regions
• Sub Saharan Africa moved from 52% to 78%, from 62m to
149m. In same period primary school population increased
by 35%.
• In 2012: 58 million children of primary age out of school in
developing regions, esp conflict zones
• 1 in 4 children in developing regions drop out of primary
school
MDG report 2014, UN NY

29. Sustainability
Sustainability has become core overarching global
goal
‘Wholesale change in the way we think and the way
we act’
UNESCO Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme for Education for Sustainable
Development, UNESCO 2014, p8

30. Sustainable Development Goals
17 SDGs and 169 targets in total, 2015-2030
• SDG 4 ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality
education and promote lifelong learning
opportunities for all’
• Sustainability runs through most
• Also ‘safe, secure and resilient’ societies
• Widespread consultation
• For all countries, only only poor countries
• To be agreed September 2015

32. Education and Sustainability
• Role of education
• To create a world that is more just, peaceful
and sustainable, all individuals and societies
must be equipped and empowered by
knowledge, skills and values’
UNESCO Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme for Education for Sustainable Development,
UNESCO 2014, p8

33. ‘Transforming learning and training
environments’
• Integrating sustainability plan into daily practice
• Reducing institutions’ ecological footprint
• No mention of potential of digital affordances
• But for ‘young people’ ‘more quality e-learning
opportunities’ and social networking for learning
and networking
UNESCO Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme for Education for Sustainable Development,
UNESCO 2014, p18 and 22

35. Incheon Declaration
June 2014
‘ICT’s must be harnessed to strengthen
education systems’

36. Sustainability
• ‘sustainable development is development that
meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs’
• Brundtland Commission, UN, 1987

37. Sustainability as a domain
• Need to
‘integrate the social, economic and
environmental dimensions of sustainability’
Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the post-2015 Development
Agenda

38. Domains of sustainability
• Environment
• Human consumption
• Economics
• Society
• ‘improved education and political empowerment
of women’
• ‘greater regard for social justice, notably equity
between rich and poor within and between
countries; intergenerational equity’
Wikipedia, entry on sustainability, visited August 12 2015

39. Conclusion
• How will we deliver education at scale?
• How will we deliver quality?
• How will education contribute to
sustainability?