UNLEASH: When Talent & Opportunities meet

Next month, from the 13–21st August, experts, talents and businesses from all over the world are coming to Denmark for nine days for the first global UNLEASH-event with the purpose of creating real, scalable solutions for UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. All the Development Goals are important but I personally look very much forward to work with the goal of quality Education and ICT.

For those of you that speak Danish, you will find that I have written extensively on the use of ICT as a basis for quality education in both primary schools as well as in higher education and now I hope to bring some of this knowledge to good use. More specifically, I find the access to and use of MOOCS as one of the prime components of any future quality education-system. MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) are online courses aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. MOOCS can consist of either traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, reading, and problem sets as well as interactive user forums to support interactions among students and educators.

In 2013, an estimated 59 million children of primary school age and 65 million adolescents of lower secondary school age were out of school. In addition, more than 50 % of the 250 million primary-school-aged children cannot read, write or count well enough to meet minimum learning standards. This situation will be extremely difficult to change without the use of MOOCS and ICT in general, as the needed high-quality teaching-resources is simply not accessible in many areas of the world. Interesting enough though, cellphones are often accessible, confirmed by the fact that many of the current online-students come from countries like India and Pakistan or from countries in Africa.

I hope to use the coming event to work on how the global community can develop a model to bring quality ICT-based education out to the millions of people that do not have the access today. One of the methods — in my perspective — is to develop greater cooperation between the providers of MOOCS and the learning institutions and governments of the countries, which are in need of higher quality education. My assertion is that the technology and the content is there — we just need to bring it out to the students and we need to integrate it in the more traditional education system. I look forward to working on these ideas for a whole nine days in the next month and — hopefully — have a lot of fun and meet new people in the process.