SEOUL, South Korea —Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte presented a three-point proposal that education policymakers and experts must consider as the world faces the challenges of digital education in the 21st Century.

Duterte was one of the event speakers at the 2023 Global Education and Innovation Summit (GEIS) here Thursday.

“We now live in an era where undeniably, technology must be harnessed to improve access, quality, and equality in education,” she said.

The advent of Artificial Intelligence, she said, will also certainly create another paradigm shift in education.

“While this possibility will present newer and greater opportunities, it will also present many uncertainties in our vision of digital education,” she said.

With this, Duterte raised the following proposals:

“The paramount consideration whenever and wherever we use technology should wrap around critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity,” she said.

The way information is currently easily accessible to learners, teachers, and parents makes “critical thinking become more important than ever.”

Critical thinking, she said, helps learners differentiate truthful information from what is not, enabling them to make better judgments and decisions in life and become productive citizens.

Duterte further said that the pandemic highlighted the importance of communicative learning.

“I share the same experience with many parents in facing the numerous educational challenges that were brought upon all of us by the pandemic,” she said.

“During the pandemic, most students in the Philippines had to stay at home for their education. And I believe this deprived them the ease and function of communicative learning,” she added.

While acknowledging the damage caused by the pandemic to learning, Duterte said learning has also been affected by other factors such as disasters, lack of infrastructure and human resources, and armed conflicts.

These, she said, deprived learners of “social interactions that are largely developed in school settings, which includes group work and collaboration.”

And learners' creativity is affected when they have fewer interactions and collaboration they get in schools.

Schools, Duterte said, are environments that are “conducive to fostering independent thought and creativity.”

The second proposal is centered on the impact of technological innovation.

“Second, we must be responsive to the effects of technology in our educational systems,” she said.

Education policymakers and experts need to be able to immediately assess the impact of technological innovations on the development of students.

This involves changing the technologies that are ineffective and improving on effective ones.

Ultimately, she said, it is necessary to remember that “the most important result is not the technology itself, but how it affects the development of our students.”

“Lastly, adaptability and sustainability of new technology in education systems must be studied by the end users before implementation,” she said.

This, she said, is in line with the concept that government programs and policies should be designed according to the behavior of people.

“We must recognize that some technologies may work for one ecosystem but may not work for others,” she said.

She said the impact and effectivity of a technology should be determined by the users — the teachers and students.

The GEIS, Duterte said, should be taken as an “opportunity to reshape education in our respective countries in order to provide our learners the all-important opportunity of reaching their full potential.”

She stressed that the “ultimate result of all our efforts should be the molding of productive global citizens, equipped with 21st-century skills, but with a heart for nation-building.” OVP MEDIA