George Brown College — Building Digital Skills for Tomorrow
Theme(s): Building Digital Skills
Summary
The Internet and the rapid adoption of digital information and communication technologies have profoundly changed virtually all aspects of our lives. Yet, there is a growing uneasiness that not all Canadians are keeping up in acquiring skills that form the foundation of a vibrant digital economy. If Canada is to regain its lead and to prosper in the digital economy, all Canadians must develop digital skills. Factors that affect our ability to succeed in this undertaking are change, leadership and commitment.
Change
It surrounds us, it's dynamic. It is a hyperbolic, pervasive and aggressive environmental condition that provides both challenge and opportunity. Predicting it, instigating it and strategically managing it, is crucial to effectively maintaining a competitive advantage.
Leadership
Provides vision, direction, and funding. It requires government policies to incent partnerships and applied research between education, public and private sector. Government needs to lead by example.
Commitment
Provides the mechanism and process for Canadians to compete in the global digital economy. Commitment creates conditions by which we will succeed. These conditions include a positive attitude towards a digital economy, enabling access to promote inclusiveness and the formation of cooperative relationships that drive innovation.
Because of we feel that the theme, Building Digital Skills for Tomorrow, is of relevant significance, our submission focuses on this theme's six discussion questions, summarized below:
- To develop skills for a digital economy, we must overcome the following challenges: Contributing to technological change, access and focus.
- The best way to effectively meet these challenges is through leadership, collaboration and inclusion.
- Entrants to the labour market need to develop digital skills while they are studying. This is supported through affordable digital infrastructure for all. Advances in mobile learning, which promote anytime, anywhere learning, require cost-effective agreements with telecommunication and Internet service providers. Affordable broadband and wireless access will foster greater inclusion.
- To ensure that the current workforce receives continuous up-skilling to remain competitive, the creation of incentives for both employers and employees will produce a culture of lifelong learning. Similarly, creating just-in-time digital learning opportunities that includes mobile learning would keep the workforce current in their digital skills.
- In the digital economy, learning involves collaboration, communication, flexibility, students mentored by professors and student-generated information. Teaching can create higher-level learning (i.e., online promotes critical thinking) and the curriculum can be restructured into blocks (modules) that can be learned anytime, anywhere on a self-paced basis, depending on the learners' needs.
- To address the digital divide, provide affordable access to infrastructure and learning. This can involve outreach and advocacy programs to identify gaps and bringing government, businesses and design to the table to ensure access to digital technologies are as ubiquitous as common infrastructures like water and electricity. Provide financial support/tax credit incentives for organizations and volunteers that provide new learning experiences and for those upgrading their digital skills.
Submission
Overview
The Government of Canada, under the collaborative efforts of the Ministries of Industry, Human Resources and Skills Development, and Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, launched a national consultation to seek the advice from academia, the private and public sector and the Canadian public at large regarding how Canada can improve its position in the digital economy. Building on the strong foundation laid out in the Speech from the Throne and the 2010 Budget, both of which committed to launching a digital economy strategy to drive the adoption of new technology, the objective of the consultation is to find solutions to specific issues facing Canada and to develop a plan to implement them.
Profile of George Brown College
Since its founding in 1967, George Brown College has integrated itself into the economic, cultural and social fabric of Toronto. One of Canada's largest, most diversified and highly respected colleges, George Brown College has launched rewarding careers for thousands of people.
Contributors to this consultation paper included senior administrators, faculty and specialists from various divisions of George Brown College.
George Brown College Response: Building Digital Skills for Tomorrow
Responses to the six questions are noted below. These include a graphic (Appendix A) created by a faculty from the School of Design. We acknowledge that building a strong foundation of digital skills is a pre-requisite to succeed and thrive in the digital economy.
1. What do you see as the most critical challenges in skills development for a digital economy?
To develop skills for a digital economy, we must overcome the following critical challenges:
- Contributing to technological change
- Access
- Focus
Contributing to technological change: To raise the level of discipline-specific digital competency among students to adequately prepare digital economy workforce-ready graduates, educators must not only be able to keep pace with technological change but be engaged contributors. This includes strengthening team-based JIT learning and management methodologies that will allow them to be proactive participants in the Beta phase of technology development. The government would need to invest in post-secondary education to ensure that educational institutions are properly resourced to ensure that staff are able to keep current with technological changes so these can be integrated into their disciplines/curricula. Building and promoting capacity should dominate the frontier in the digital ecosystem. Continual engagement with applied research provides the catalyst to develop this capacity (see Russell International Excellence Group). Flexibility, adaptability and critical thinking will give Canada a competitive edge. These skills, therefore, must be taught.
Access: Significant investments would be required to ensure that infrastructure is available to keep pace with technological changes and ensure that all students have access to it. To meet the specific needs of students and workers in various disciplines, learning platforms should not be standardized. Instructors would need access to training to ensure knowledge transfer to students. Indeed, the traditional role and relationship of instructor and student are undergoing change, as savvy instructors adapt to learn from students. Post-secondary institutions and teaching need to transition into innovative learning centres. Professors need to transform themselves into collaborators and facilitators. Increased applied research will benefit everyone, including students.
Focus: "Wait and see"/cautious attitudes and cultural reticence to risk taking are counter-productive. Risk is a key aspect of innovation. This extends to education, which needs to become more entrepreneurial in the approach to learning, teaching and problem solving in and out of the classroom. We also need to set aggressive targets to meet future labour shortages and to create a diversified workforce free of gender imbalance in certain industry sectors. At the same time, we must maintain a holistic balance between digital and traditional skills required by the workforce. To cut through and to galvanize these points, government, industry, and education need to get together to set the agenda. We need to be cognizant of social changes and to the tall poppy syndrome, where new entrants with power may be subjected to criticism. Finally, government policies need to support change, which will take place in the digital economy. This requires serious discussion and decisions need to be made.
2. What is the best way to address these challenges?
We propose two ways to effectively meet these challenges:
- Leadership
- Collaboration and Inclusion
Leadership: Well-defined government policies will be required. Governments should consider the digital infrastructure as important as other infrastructures such as electricity, water, and roads. Additional government policies need to encourage Canadian companies, educators and incubators to invest towards the creation of innovative products/services that incorporate technological change. Tax incentives will allow government, private sector and educational institutions to work toward a long-term vision through strategic alliances and have faculty, students, and administrators involved at the earliest possible phases of development. This would ensure that the next generation of professionals starts at the leading edge.
Collaboration and Inclusion: Policies should incent private/public sector partnerships where funding, equipment, and intellectual capital are made available to post-secondary institutions. Encourage collaboration by transitioning from hierarchal models to prototypes of distributed models of corporate intelligence. This includes government entities sharing raw data for development purposes.
To promote unfettered experimentation and development, allow for infrastructure that is off-grid and uncobbled by centralized IT policies. Similarly, create opportunities for cross-disciplinary projects/teaching/learning and to facilitate knowledge transfer and to remove academic silos. Investing in open source would create a participatory digital generation while ensuring availability to everyone. Instructors should be trained to support the use of digital technologies throughout the educational system — offline and online.
What can we do to ensure that labour market entrants have digital skills?
To ensure the use of digital skills in the workplace, we can help students develop these while they are studying. This could be supported by ensuring the digital infrastructure is available to all (e.g., seamless wireless connectivity). This would allow institutions to ensure faculty are able to design and implement a curriculum of the 21st centre. Daily use of web-based and mobile digital technologies while students are in college will enhance digital skills. Advances in mobile learning, which promote anytime, anywhere learning, require cost-effective agreements with telecommunication and Internet service providers. Affordable broadband and wireless access will foster greater inclusion.
4. What is the best way to ensure the current workforce gets the continuous up-skilling required to remain competitive in the digital economy? Are different tactics required for SMEs versus large enterprises?
With access to an affordable and robust infrastructure, educational institutions can strengthen their ability to serve the continuing education needs of both large and small enterprises.
From an enterprise perspective, government tax credits for tuition reimbursement would serve as a major incentive for workplace development. Creating incentives for employers and employees could produce a culture of lifelong learners in Canada while enhancing our competitiveness in the digital economy.
Creating just-in-time (JIT) digital learning opportunities would help to promote continuous education. A flexible continuous education program would enable the current workforce to acquire skills over a shorter period of time and reduce costs associated with employee absenteeism.
5. How will the digital economy impact the learning system in Canada? How we teach? How we learn?
Learning in the digital economy involves collaboration, communication, flexibility, students mentored by professors and student-generated information. Teaching can create higher-level learning (i.e., online promotes critical thinking) and the curriculum can be restructured into blocks (modules) that can be learned anytime, anywhere on a self-paced basis, depending on the learners' needs. Expect greater dependence on mobile devices, games and online learning models. Tools for teaching and learning will be adaptable/scalable, moving away from the "one size fits all" model. There will be more cooperation/collaboration between higher education units and less ownership of content. The more accessible and transparent the information, the more likely innovation will follow. Some countries are on their way. Great Britain, for example, has taken the open-linked raw data approach towards education. There may be smaller, organic clustering of learners — may be one-on-one or many-on-many.
The digital economy will require new monetization models that support mass collaboration and to ensure that creators receive compensation. Educational institutions will require up-to-date ICT infrastructure. The focus will be on creative commons, so we will need to ensure that copyright and other legislation are not restrictive.
There should be provisions for a form of faculty and student IP agreements that are consistent with University models. Progressive agreements will promote more disclosures that will create new revenue streams for colleges.
How can we teach?
With the emergence of e-books, iPads, netbooks and other mobile devices yet to be developed, our learning system will undergo a major change in the next five years. The public educational experience will not be able to support personalized one-to-one coaching or small group learning in light of increased competition from web-based teaching, free offerings from open learning resources, as well as the significant cost difference between online and traditional modes of delivery. The very foundation of education based on the traditional Socratic teaching method will move to a second or third choice as a teaching modality.
Asynchronous (just in time) delivery methods will become ubiquitous and post-secondary institutions that have the technological infrastructure and faculty skilled in these modalities will stand to benefit.
Our teaching roles will need to be redefined. Traditional notions of teaching will not stand up in an environment of socially mediated, persistent and ubiquitous knowledge. In the future, we may outsource portions of our teaching load offshore, which will further expand our notion of the classroom to include participants across the globe.
We will become better storytellers as we capture and edit our collective knowledge narrative. Finally, teachers will need to facilitate both non-linear and linear (lateral) thinking.
How can we learn?
Learning today is about convergence, communication and interaction. Learning theories confirm that we learn best when we connect to and collaborate with others. Today's workplace demands the same.
Flexibility is another vital element of learning. This includes accessing information and communicating on demand. In the digital economy, teachers support learning as guides and mentors. The classroom emphasizes problem solving, discovery and application based on real-life projects. Encourage interdisciplinary connections as well as informal (incidental) learning.
Technology helps students to communicate, collaborate, access and integrate information. Such technologies, including mobile technologies have to be encouraged — not restricted by college and classroom policies.
Students will need to take greater responsibility for their learning. Equipped with technology and knowledge (and use) of digital technology tools, students will no longer be passive consumers of knowledge but active participants with high expectations.
When everyone and everything is on the web the corollary will be a yearning for the human touch, for a face-to-face interaction that requires movement from and to a space in a particular time. There will be a growing need for validating our virtual existence with some sort of culminating event or interaction that requires this physical presence in order to make it somehow more real, integral and authentic. Much of what was mentioned earlier is available at low or no cost on the web and the quality is relatively good. As more of our activities gain validity in the digital ecosystem the culture of accreditation that lies at the heart of our value proposition is being openly challenged in light of these realities.
6. What strategies could be employed to address the digital divide?
Addressing the digital divide calls for affordable access to infrastructure and learning — inclusion. This can involve outreach and advocacy programs to identify gaps in the digital divide and to provide affordable infrastructure and access. Mentoring functions can help to ensure knowledge transfer to peer groups and the broader community. Bring government, businesses and design to the same brainstorming/decision-making table. Designers' design thinking and methodologies complement the problem solving and decision-making process. This would make access to digital technology/ICT as ubiquitous and available as common utilities such as water and electricity. Following global initiatives such as One Laptop per Child, why not initiate One iPad Per Child?
Provide financial support/tax credit incentives for organizations and volunteers that provide new learning experiences and for individuals who upgrade their digital technology skills. Promote free Wi-Fi accessibility everywhere. Continue funding and outreach activities to high priority neighbourhoods/specific demographic groups. Customize learning platforms to meet the unique needs of needs of students and workers in various disciplines. Encourage collaborative, consortium-based approaches to educational technologies ranging from computer hardware, networks (cloud computing), simulation software, learning management systems, etc. Empower students by teaching them how to tell their stories using digital technologies. Have them build, program and maintain their own media outlet that expresses their unique views. Create a model of 1) adaptability, 2) analytical thinking, 3) project-based environment, 4) curiosity of all life-long learning, 5) a guide of personal digital skills, 6) flexibility of time and place.
