(This entry is part of a series by Gordon Freedman, Blackboard's VP of education strategy, in which he reflects on technology and education as he travels around the world to meet with innovative education leaders and researchers, government leaders, and members of the Blackboard community who are experimenting in e-Learning and changing the education landscape.)
When the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (www.OECD.org) chose Santo Domingo for its site for the 2nd Global Education Forum, it struck me as unusual.
But when I recalled it was from these waters that Christopher Columbus searched in vain for a passage to India, it began to make sense. The city’s safe harbor, first entered by the great European explorer in 1492, has been the site of centuries of global intrigue and then national independence in the mid 1800’s. The Dominican Republic, all these years later, became the gracious host to this international gathering that looked for the new gold standard in today’s global village – education.
It is hard to argue with an island nation that was the initial point of discovery for Europeans coming to the Americas as a venue for a global education conference in the 21st century. In our fully globalized society today, education has clearly become the one similar resource by which all nations will measure themselves going forward. And the OECD, a champion of economic development based on investments in the human potential of nations, is one of the very strongest organizational voices in the international arena. It is dedicated to large-scale education improvement in both developed nation members and in its developing nation partners.
Since it was established in 1960 as an offshoot of the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II, OECD has been among the premiere global entities concentrating on bringing up economic, health and education standing everywhere through the contributions from its 30 developed nation members. This Global Forum in the Caribbean brought 20 ministers of education together and their staff and hundreds of others to exchange ideas and to listen to new perspectives and approaches on education from around the globe. They also gathered in the Dominican Republic, in particular, to employ their combined expertise to provide guidance to the Dominican Republic in its quest to improve education in their country as well as across Latin America.
Barbara Ischinger, OCED’s Director of Education, hosted the Global Education Forum this spring. In 2006, in a similar gathering in Rome, Ischinger summarized the place of education in today’s world: “No economy in the world can afford to neglect education. The OECD aims to help countries improve the quality, equity and efficiency of their education systems through appropriate policies and practices.” (Source) Two years later, Ischinger described the strides made at the Dominican Republic gathering. “This conference was a great opportunity to act as an honest broker between diverse education systems and cultures.”
The Global Forum on Education brought together approximately 500 participants in total, coming from Europe (Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Flemish Community, France, Georgia, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Turkey), Asia (Oman, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam); the Americas (Argentina, Canada, Chile, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, United States) and Africa (Cameroon, Senegal, South Africa).
Additionally, nearly 70 International organisations, institutions, universities and associations were in attendance, including the European Community, UNESCO, the International Association of Universities, the World Bank, and US AID. “The Global Forum in the Dominican Republic was a very successful stock exchange for countries. For example, ministers from Denmark and Austria listened with interest to a presentation on best practices on integration in Brazil and vice versa,” Ischinger said.
As expressed by the participants nearly every country is grappling to some extent with the universal issues of education reform, modernization and transformation. What are some of the universal issues?
- Emphasis on education for all, from Pre-K to Lifelong learning. Such an emphasis puts tremendous pressure on nations to open up access to education and especially higher education.
- Necessity of maintaining high-quality education as the education offerings are expanded to provide for more and more students and learners. In the past, it was never expected that education would be so universal.
- The use of technology wisely and widely to help not only in direct education, but also in professional development, workforce development, community outreach and administrative support.
In such a diverse gathering, it is difficult for attendees from developed nations to understand that in countries like the Dominican Republic or Pakistan significant portions of the population may be without the basic infrastructure such as electricity, adequate buildings and teachers to make even rudimentary education possible. Yet, every country is moving toward the same goals – building human capital to run knowledge economies. Conversely, many developed nations, as they stretch to grow their higher education numbers are finding it difficult to retain the growing number of students in college until graduation.
The conference opened with a keynote from Bertel Haarder, Minister of Education in Denmark, speaking of improving education systems. The conference highlights from the Forum include:
- The Secretary of State in the Romanian Ministry of Education, Remus Pricopie, and Joao Pedro Gomez Ruivo, from the Portugal’s Ministry of Education, in separate sessions highlighted the necessity of complete technology, or Information Communication Technology (ICT) plans at a national level.
- The need for Institutional Assessment was clear in a session on international systems for learning evaluation ran by Alejandrina German Mejia, the State Secretary for Education in the Dominican Republic.
- Giorgi Nodia, Minister of Education and Science, from Georgia, and Eva Ergon-Polak, Secretary-General and Executive Director of the International Association of Universities (IAU), ran a session on Access, Success, and Relevance in Higher Education further emphasizing the value of student engagement.
- Kurt Larsen, of the World Bank, and Carl Dahlman of Georgetown University (USA) spoke about the global trends in their implications for national education and learning systems.
In describing their session, Larsen’s and Dahlman’s highlighted that, “The world is undergoing dramatic and unprecedented changes in this age of increasing globalization. The knowledge and information technology revolution, as well as many growing social and economic trends, have changed how we live, how organizations do business, and how well countries perform in the global economy.” They suggested three critical points for national systems as a set up for the subsequent discussion of these/this topic:
- Understanding needs: Developing new approaches to link education to the labor market and responding to changes by developing a system of lifelong learning.
- Addressing challenges: Building a responsive and flexible education system, developing core competencies and skills, and strengthening school to work linkages.
- Applying tools and strategies: Examining new trends in governance, management, and financing, promoting public-private partnerships, and using effective applications of ICT in education.
As Larsen and Dahlman indicated the world is changing and the Forum helped bring together perspectives and approaches for addressing these universal issues from nations and societies worldwide. The question still remains what is the correct solution and how will nations continue to build their knowledge economies?
Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, was not the first place Columbus landed in the New World, but it was where he made his headquarters, naming Santo Domingo after his father and his brother’s house still stands on the ramparts along the historic Ozama River. As I left the Dominican Republic and peered down on this port city that brought Europeans into the New World, I could not stop from thinking what a true moment in history this Forum was, to see such a gathering from so many nations working on something so worthy, whose global seeds were sown here so long ago.
