Author(s): Zhu Xinyu, Ma Xiaoqiang, Wei Yina, Luo Li, Jin Long, Li Yongzhi
Organization(s): 1.China National Academy of Educational Sciences
Source: Educational Research
ISSN: 1002-5731
Date: 2024.06
Abstract: At present, the boom in digital technology has triggered a competitively vigorous reform of global education, but with an initially ambiguous prospect. Currently, the evaluation of global digital education holds greater significance than its extraordinary difficulty. To reach a global consensus on the reform of global education, explore the appropriate path for the development of digital education, and promote the development of digital civilization, this study constructs the index system for the evaluation of the development of global digital education by combining traditional evaluation methods and multimodal evidence-based evaluation methods. To leverage the strengths of systematic research, a multi-disciplinary team of nearly 100 researchers was assembled. They gathered evidence-based data using various methods on the progress of digital education in over 200 countries and regions worldwide, focused on 62 leading countries in this field, and generated the 2023 index report encompassing six key dimensions of global digital education development. The analysis yielded the following key findings: the United States, Finland, and the Republic of Korea rank the top three, and China is in the first tier; global digital education features different stages of development, and nearly 70 percent of the countries are in the stage of sharing resources; global digital education shows unevenly-developed dimensions, and the leading countries exhibit apparent advantages. Presently, China relatively leads the world in data-driven educational governance, the establishment and application of public digital education resources, the construction of the system for students’ digital literacy cultivation, and the construction of the digital learning environment. However, it still has room for improvement in digital literacy cultivation targeting all citizens and teachers, the integration of online and offline courses, the exploration into personalized learning systems, the digital teaching reform, and the construction of digital education laws and systems. Moving forward, China should deepen digitalization and regard it as the lever of the educational reform, and make continuous efforts to improve the digital literacy of all citizens, integrate personalized learning systems, improve laws and regulations for digital education, generate and apply personalized digital resources, unlock the value of data, and apply artificial intelligence in an integrated manner, so as to propel its digital education from quantitative gains towards qualitative advancements, thereby fostering a systematic leap forward and contributing strategies to the global advancement of digital education.
Keywords: digital education； development index； artificial intelligence （AI）； educational digitization