UNICEF And Microsoft Partner To Expand Global Digitized Education

This weekend the United Nations hosted the Transforming Education Summit, which included a presentation from UNICEF and Microsoft about their joint project Learning Passport and how it extends digitized education into new corners of the world, promising “a digital future for every child.” The presentation included reports from government officials of Mexico, Laos, and Zimbabwe.

Digitized education tools have been attempted in other regions before. New Globe was founded in 2007, embarking on “a journey from proof-of-concept community school programs, to participating in national multi-partner public-private partnerships, acting as technical service delivery partners to statewide programs at scale, and ultimately supporting national government transformation programs.” Their for-profit model for taking on a nation’s education system has met with mixed results; they have had some limited success in Kenya, met with controversy in Liberia, and were rejected in Uganda.

Learning Passport is more ambitious. Only a few years old, it is now in 26 countries with 56 languages represented. UNICEF, the presenters said, saw a growing education crisis marked by low literacy rates and exacerbated by displaced refugee children and the shuttering of schools during the pandemic—in other words, students whose education had been dramatically interrupted. Microsoft has always had a keen interest in the education market. And so the two teamed up to create a program that could provide digitized education materials for a wide variety of contexts, including communities with little or no reliable internet.

There are some clear benefits to a program that can follow students wherever they may be. An audience member observed that among the millions of Ukranian refugees in Poland are hundreds of thousands students who are now in Polish schools, able to continue their education in their own language thanks in part to Learning Passport.

The presentation also showed a video of Myanmar refugees in a school in Bangladesh, learning in their native tongue. And all three government officials touted the program’s usefulness for teacher training, which helps build capacity.

The big Learning Passport innovation has been to make digitized education available in places that have no internet connectivity (a piece of tech that made Time’s list of Best Innovations of 2021). They key appears to be a small server loaded with the appropriate education library—essentially cyber school in a digital box. That’s a critical feature for a nation like Zimbabwe, where internet access is still spotty at best.

There are some limitations with this sort of program. An attendee at the presentation pointed out that it is a huge obstacle for students not to be taught in their first language. In Laos, only about 52% of the population speaks the official language as their first language, and there are over 80 minority languages; that makes Learning Passport a tough fit for that nation, and it makes the goal of not leaving anyone behind a challenge.

A cyber-schooling program is only as good as the materials that are digitized. The website comment is a broad and vague:

The platform serves local, contextualized content as well as global supplementary resources to support learners and improve learning outcomes. We are currently collating a library of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and content donations by leading private companies to offer a variety of supplementary content for localisation and use by implementing offices.

An attendee asked questions that spoke to the quality of the program. How does it insure that refugees will be able to rejoin their schools when they return home? Who is making sure that the materials are good quality? The presenters didn’t really answer the question. They emphasized that literacy is key and a “common framework;” that curriculum framework was developed in partnership with Cambridge University

Portions of the presentation emphasized how students find the use of computers, tablets, and digitized materials very interesting, but here in the U.S. virtual schooling has not been very successful. However, Learning Passport seems aimed at contexts in which there are few better alternatives.

A cynic might note that with this program Microsoft opens a market for computers and software worth billions and billions of dollars. But Learning Passport also gets education to students who might otherwise have been neglected and unserved. The program’s goal is summarized in one of Cambridge’s research reports as “to improve the quality of education for children who, for whatever reason, are unable to access national education systems satisfactorily, either temporarily or permanently.”

It’s a 21st century solution to an age-old problem, and the program plans to move further and faster.