Technology as a Facilitator of Educational Inclusion

The fourth Sustainable Development Goal of the United Nations 2030 Agenda calls for quality, inclusive, and equitable education for all people. But how do you consolidate access to education that transcends social, cultural, and economic barriers?

With the help of technological resources that guarantee inclusion, educational institutions can train more critical citizens with the necessary skills to face challenges in life. The design and planning of classes also benefit from using these tools because their integration into an interactive environment promotes cooperation and social transformation.

According to Tiffin University, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contribute to building learning environments that persevere despite the contextual factors that affect them. So, if leveraging the technological means that provide connection is useful, what challenges must be considered to achieve inclusion?

Digital Gaps

The University on the Internet (UNIR) describes how ICTs have transformed the way knowledge is acquired and how people relate. However, using technology in academia requires training and resources that must be considered beforehand, such as:

• Training teachers to introduce ICT into the curriculum, giving them options to determine which technologies are best suited to the subject and their students.
• Educating students and teaching them the correct use of these tools.
• Providing educational institutions with the necessary equipment, individually and collectively.

If teachers have the necessary training, technology can be adopted in the classroom efficiently. It is not only about incorporating it but also keeping in mind the gaps in access to the same education.

UNIR indicates that not all families can access the internet or have the required devices. However, other aspects not considered can cause more exclusion, including:

• Economic level: Generally, minors with families with fewer resources attain lower academic results. If ICTs provide all students equally with the same technological resources, then all could maximize their performance.
• Geographical, cultural, or gender reasons: The University on the Internet proposes solutions to avoid educational gaps, for example, delivering electronic tablets with downloaded material to a center so girls of Romani ethnicity can access education from home.
• Functional diversity: People with disabilities need adapted and inclusive classrooms. There are examples where braille keyboards or printers are available in educational facilities.
• Immigration: Cultural diversity should not be a reason for discrimination. Activities designed to represent multiculturalism can be carried out with techniques such as gamification.

Two professors from the Faculty of Human Sciences and Education of the University Zaragoza in Spain, Cecilia Latorre and Alejandro Quintas, presented their books called “Technologies and Neuroeducation with an Inclusive Approach” and “Educational Inclusion and Technologies for Learning”. From these investigations, Latorre explains that the economic issue is an obvious limitation that can be attenuated through teachers’ creativity: “For example, if you work on a project where it is necessary to use the computer, instead of it being an individual work, you can do alternative work, such as group projects and working in pairs, based on cooperative learning.”

In addition, she argues that “the most important thing is to treat the use of technology from an inclusive perspective. If we are going to integrate different tools that should facilitate or motivate learning, we have to rethink whether they are going to work or not.”

A guide to finding alternatives in teaching methodologies comes from Eduardo Esteban Pérez León, a Colombian professor with more than 59 national and international awards for promoting learning with technological tools and applications for students with disabilities.

Although Pérez León’s social work has contributed to regional initiatives against bullying and drug addiction, his focus has been on the population with disabilities. This teacher from the Guaimaral Technical Institute in Cucuta, Colombia, says, “Inclusion does not mean opening the door for the child to listen or watch the class passively. The success of our model is that the child feels important, valued, and is a protagonist in their education.”

One evidence of the above is an app the Institute created to teach geometry to visually impaired students. The solution only needs to be downloaded once and can be used without connectivity. “Offline tools have been key; teachers turn to innovation so that education does not lose quality,” says Pérez León.

Digital ramps to reduce barriers

Digital ramps are assistive technologies, either hardware or software, which facilitate accessing and using computer resources that provide specific functional capacities to people with disabilities. These include extended keyboards, screen readers, pushbuttons, mouse joysticks, programs that modify the size or color of the cursor, keyboard or mouse emulators, and eye-tracking devices, among others.

Professor Florencia Sardiña explains that those who take advantage of these tools can learn alongside their peers and have the same opportunity, while promoting equity and maintaining the quality of learning.

A concrete example is Ceibal, the Uruguayan center for educational innovation with digital technologies. While its objective is to promote the integration of technology into education to improve learning and boost the processes of innovation, inclusion, and personal growth, one of its offerings includes advising teachers to determine which technological resource best suits the particularities of a student with disabilities.

Ceibal has the Reference Center for Inclusive Technology (CeRTI Ceibal), where they coordinate the Valijas Viajeras Project, a kit of digital ramps to bring educational centers the technological solutions that favor students’ access and use of Ceibal devices. This way, teachers can provide resources to students with motor, visual, and/or cognitive barriers.

According to Mario Calderón, CEO and Co-founder of SkillMapper, some of the technological instruments used in the educational field for the learning of people with disabilities include: the use of voice commands so that students with visual disabilities can write a text when narrating or listening to an audiobook and also receive automated descriptions of images to glimpse or imagine the photograph. In addition, a virtual reality solution allows people with autism to interact in a simulated social situation.

Customizing software for learning is not easy, but it is crucial. Gillian Hayes, the Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Irvine, indicates that these software systems must be flexible, and in this scheme, everyone wins. Even if a person has no disability, they still have individual preferences and ways to learn best, motivating them to participate.

Mario Calderon suggests that the main barrier to developing resources for persons with disabilities to access education is the lack of economic incentives. In general, for-profit or non-profit organizations show interest in providing the necessary tools for this group of people.

For her part, Gillian Hayes explains that not only products must be more accessible, but also organizations. She states that if large technology companies, researchers, and educational technology designers make their workspaces more inclusive and incorporate people with disabilities into their teams, they will contribute ideas that someone without that experience could not consider.

Authors Paul Lynch, Nidhi Singal, and Gill Althia Francis share that the work is in building a research agenda in EdTech (educational technology) for the future. If these studies align with the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the UN, it will be possible to guarantee universal access to the most appropriate assistive technologies. They concur that focusing on quality learning experiences for children with disabilities will serve in future research to adopt a multidimensional vision of educational technology, considering the educational institution’s income, participation, and empowerment.

Accessible education in conflict zones

According to UNESCO, more than 127 million children are out of school and living in crises. 25% of the world’s children live in countries affected by conflict or disaster. It states that “emergencies caused by armed conflict, instability, pandemics, climate change, and disasters disrupt education and leave millions of children and young people out of school worldwide.”

For that organization, humanitarian response is a priority to support migrants, refugees, internally displaced persons, returnees, and host communities. Therefore, they seek to reduce disaster risks in the education sector by helping prepare authorities in schools and industry.

Currently, UNESCO is working to ensure the continuity of learning in Ukraine and protect education in Afghanistan, where thousands of women have been left behind due to the restrictions on access to education. UNESCO also offers permanent support to countries such as Iraq and Syria to help them face protracted crises.

Saalim Koomar, Caitlin Moss Coflan, and Tom Kaye compiled a list of interventions and efforts effectively implemented with educational technology in environments of fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV). They divided resources into four categories: educational content and devices, system administration, teacher professional development, and resource libraries.

Among these solutions were:

• Rumie – Through quality educational resources, they created a digitalized curriculum for children from primary to high school. In 2015, with the Learn Syria program, students could study autonomously through content uploaded to tablets without an internet connection.
• MEERS – provides data and research to better understand and address refugee children’s educational and psychosocial needs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Training teachers and providing them with resources allows them to conduct assessments for decision-making in changing situations.
• Accelerating Equitable Access to School, Reading, Student Retention, and Accountability (ACCELERE!) – focuses on improving the reading outcomes of more than one million children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It features developing instructional materials, improving teacher pedagogy, creating safe learning spaces, and working with the government to strengthen accountability systems and education policies.
• Darakht-e Danesh – is an online library that is also the first Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative in Afghanistan. It was instituted to improve teachers’ knowledge of subjects and access to and use of learning materials.

The German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) report established that these crises and conflicts are some of the biggest obstacles to ensuring inclusive, equitable, and quality education for all people. It recognizes that mobility of learning is essential for educational continuity, so it identified the main trends and instruments that work in these environments.

The research reveals that Information and Communication Technologies can potentially strengthen educational systems. For example, using mobile cash transfers ensures that teachers receive their salary; through text messages, parents, guardians, and young people are informed about any danger near schools; ICTs enable data on students, teachers, institutions, and educational infrastructure to be collected.

The report recognizes hybrid learning as relevant to postsecondary education. It improves primary formal and non-formal education. Another widely used medium is radio to mobilize children in and out of school. Electronic tablets are used to educate children who do not attend an institution in person and are in remote places.

In the same way, educational systems are investing in open educational resources that are available quickly, at low cost, and adapted to the specific needs of the group or locality. Videos also are a means to impart necessary life skills to communities, aiming to create a dialogue on important issues.

Apart from presenting different initiatives that work with these tools, the GIZ research concludes with the importance of understanding that these problems do not affect all children equally, nor are the implications the same in different regions. It proposes that more information is needed on the impact of technology on education in situations like this or people with cognitive or physical disabilities or vulnerable populations (including ethnic, racial, or religious minority communities within refugee camps) and rural and urban settings.

It states that “research and development of programs related to gender, capacity, and other inclusion and equality issues for underrepresented groups must be a priority for donors and governments.”

Next steps

In a report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, multiple authors describe two approaches to thinking that predominate in today’s field of educational technology: technology-driven and technology-assisted. The first focuses on how technology is used to replace or minimize the role of educators, while the second seeks to improve existing teaching methods. While addressing different problems, both have limitations and do not always lead to inclusion.

For these reasons, experts propose a technologically inclusive education system, where decisions on using technological resources are accompanied by other pedagogical options, considering the purpose and context. They also suggest that a Global Education Service hosted by an organization such as UNESCO or UNICEF should be consolidated to provide remote learning opportunities through various internet channels with low, free-of-charge technology.

The framework they lay out for a viable minimum education system would include the following:

• The creation of a lifetime digital student ID, which would be issued at the beginning of compulsory education, allowing the student to control their personal data.
• The redistribution of classrooms into cohorts or groups, while the teachers’ career paths are transformed. Students would access different learning activities with teacher support, while teachers would rely on more experienced colleagues in group teaching. This arrangement would make it possible to coordinate small and large groups.
• The construction of infrastructure and regulation of “in-person distance education,” using remote learning centers that provide more opportunities, featuring the accompaniment of trained personnel, socialization among peers, and absence of geographical limitations.

The recent case of the pandemic and the adjustments in education that had to be implemented quickly are an example that learning can be achieved more flexibly and accessibly. The particular context of the region, the environment, or each student’s situation must be considered in approaching the right to study while the barriers and limitations are dissolved. Although it is not an easy path, listening and considering the different experiences of our world’s reality will generate initiatives promoting learning.

If you want to know more about inclusive education and the resources you can use, we recommend reading this article or watching our webinar on educational technology for inclusion. What tools or new methodologies would you include in the classroom?

Translation by Daniel Wetta

Nohemí Vilchis EdTech Specialist in Observatory for the Institute for the Future of Education (nohemi.vilchis@tec.mx)

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