ISC experts appointed to the COVID-Education Alliance (COVIDEA)

A Primer: COVID Education Alliance (COVIDEA)

Adapting education systems to a fast changing and increasingly digital world through the use of appropriate technologies

Following an open call for nominations addressed to the ISC membership in May 2020, we are delighted to announce the selected group of international experts that will join COVIDEA, a COVID-Education Alliance of partners with expertise in digital education.

The initiative aims at making a substantive contribution to addressing the educational challenges associated with and responding to lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic by looking into how innovations and technologies can help education institutions respond to similar challenges in the future and how to enable life-long learning with digital tools that are fit for purpose. The overall objective is to move learning societies onto a more sustainable development path, and to contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as they relate to universal education and life-long learning.

COVIDEA is coordinated by the multidisciplinary Platform for Transformative Technologies (P4TT) led by Dr. Veerle Vandeweerd and Dr. Lieve Fransen, as well as Georgios Kostakos and Arturo Biglia at the Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability (FOGGS).

Using digital technologies to chart the way forward towards education for all and life-long learning is urgently needed to ensure that students are equipped with the skills, expertise, emotional and social intelligence for the jobs of the future and a fulfilling and meaningful life. The knowledge is there, the tools are there, the digital infrastructure is available in most places in the world, now is the time to bring education into the digital age, using appropriate technology to augment how we teach and what we teach.
Veerle Vandeweerd

The duration of the full project is estimated at two to three years, with a potentially more active engagement by the scientific community represented by the ISC towards the end of that timeline.

The experts appointed include:

Prof. Dr. Eyüp Artvinli (Turkey)
Full Member at the Faculty of Education, Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Turkey

Stephen Downes (Canada)
Senior Research Officer, National Research Council Canada

Dr. Maggie Hartnett (New Zealand)
Senior lecturer, Institute of Education, Massey University, New Zealand

Dr. Janette M. Hughes (Canada)
Canada Research Chair, Technology & Pedagogy; Professor, Ontario Tech University, Faculty of Education, Oshawa, Canada

Prof. Koji Ohnishi (Japan)
Research Professor (Human Geography), University of Toyama, Japan

Prof. Neil Selwyn (Australia, United Kingdom)
Distinguished Research Professor, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne , Australia

Dr. Padmanabhan Seshaiyer (USA)
Associate Dean, College of Science; Director, Center for Outreach in Mathematics Professional Learning & Educational Technologies and; Director, STEM Accelerator Program, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

More information on COVIDEA is available on the FOGGS website.

Image by Ernesto Eslava on Pixabay