Reimagining Digital Learning for Sustainable Development: How Upskilling, Data Analytics, and Educational Technologies Close the Skills Gap

Reimagining Digital Learning for Sustainable Development is a comprehensive playbook for education leaders, policy makers, and other key stakeholders leading the modernization of learning and development in their institutions as they build a high value knowledge economy and prepare learners for jobs that don't yet exist.

Currently, nearly every aspect of human activity, including the ways we absorb and apply learning, is influenced by disruptive digital technologies. The jobs available today are no longer predicators of future employment, and current and future workforce members will need to augment their competencies through a lifetime of continuous upskilling and reskilling to meet the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This book features curated insights and real-world cases from thought leaders throughout the world and identifies major shifts in content formats, pedagogic approaches, technology frameworks, user and design experiences, and learner roles and expectations that will reshape our institutions, including those in emerging economies.

The agile, lean, and cost-effective strategies proposed here will function in scalable and flexible bandwidth environments, enabling education leaders and practitioners to transform brick-and-mortar learning organizations into digital and blended ecosystems and to achieve the United Nation’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Sheila Jagannathan is the Head of the Open Learning Campus at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., USA. She serves as the organization’s focal point on digital learning and issues at the intersection of technology use and education in emerging countries. She is an internationally recognized thought leader, advisor, author and a forward-thinking senior education leader with over 35 years of experience in leading capacity building, knowledge management, data, social learning and transformation change across public and private organizations. She has been responsible for designing and implementing world-class solutions in challenging global environments, resulting in performance and productivity improvements. Sheila also provides policy advice and technical assistance to World Bank country-level capacity building programs (both government and training centers of excellence seeking to introduce technologies in their educational systems) in, East Asia, China, the Middle East and North Africa, Africa and South Asia. Her current areas of interest and activity include: skilling and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 60-year curricula, corporate talent management, diversity & inclusion, organizational development, MOOCs, experiential pedagogy, online/hybrid strategies, multimodal and social learning environments, immersive learning (AR/VR), use of artificial education in education, big data analytics, LXPs, LMS, and learning ecosystems. She has written articles for various peer-reviewed publications and journals. She is on the advisory board and planning committees of major professional associations of learning such as the Canadian Foreign Service Institute, Global Distance Learning Network, Indian National Skills Development Council, George Mason University, E-learning Africa, (Annual International Conference for developing E-learning capacities in Africa), International Conference on e-learning (ICEL), and Skills Development Councils.