Page 32 - International Perspectives on Effective Teaching and Learning in Digital Education

Pedro Tadeu and Carlos Brigas

Moreover, the gap between those with access to digital technologies and
those without has also increased the turn to online learning, potentially wors-
ening existing educational inequalities (Robinson et al., 15). We know that
not everyone has equal access to digital education, which makes digital edu-
cation even more exclusive for some.
Despite all the significant changes made in digital education, there are still
several issues that remain as major obstacles, another one is the internet con-
nectivity. This is one of the major issues, since it is a fundamental requirement
for digital education; yet, a significant portion of the global population still
misses a good internet access. If we pay attention to the United Nations' In-
ternational Telecommunication Union (ITU) (), in 19 only 53.6% of the
world population have Internet access, this study also says that in 3 ap-
proximately 67% of the world's population was using the Internet, leaving
around .6 billion people still offline. This is a huge gap, particularly in the
developing countries, where internet penetration rates are very low. The lack
of internet connectivity is due to many aspects, some of them are related to
infrastructure problems, affordability, and the digital literacy also plays a key
role. In many rural and remote areas, the necessary infrastructure for internet
connectivity simply didn't exist, even if in some areas there exist infrastruc-
ture, the real cost of internet services that are provided can be very high for
the common public. Even when the public have access to the Internet, there
is still a lack of digital literacy skills that didn't allow these persons to use ef-
fectively the digital educational resources (Van Dijk, 6). This digital gap
has significant implications for education since it exacerbates existing edu-
cational inequalities, as, for instance, those without internet access cannot
benefit from online educational resources. This type of problems has been
particularly notice during the COVID-19 pandemic, when almost every edu-
cational institutions turned to the online process. Students that didn't have
a reliable internet access were significantly in disadvantaged comparing to
their colleagues. In this way we have open even more the educational breach
(Reimers & Schleicher, ). So, dealing with the issue of internet connectiv-
ity is one of the crucial steps for the future of digital education. There should
be made efforts to improve infrastructure, making internet services more af-
fordable to the general public, enhancing also the digital literacy skills. Only
then, we can start thinking on a fully acomplished digital education – in a
world where high-quality education is accessible to all, regardless of location
or socioeconomic status.
Nevertheless, this extraordinary evolution/revolution was achieved due to
the many individuals and organisations that played important roles. Investi-

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