Africa Education Review

 REINVENTING EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES AND POLICIES WITH DIGITALIZATION

Digital technologies have been revamping nearly all aspects of human life. Starting from traveling to, work, entertainment, business, e-commerce, and communications are some of the certain areas which have been transformed in recent decades. Digitalization, in the education is not just replacing paper books with e-books and multimedia, but overall educational practices and policies. In this day and age, digitalization of education remains one of the topmost priorities of educational systems of all countries worldwide. Almost every field of education including business, arts, engineering, agriculture, health and welfare, and many others were slowly transforming the practice with the help of technical tools. With the adoption of the internet, smartphones, mobile apps, tablets, and other modern devices, things are becoming more and more digitalized in classrooms. Digital classrooms, e-learning, and the advanced technological medium are slowly adopted by the students, and provides a great deal of flexibility, convenience in timetables and schedules, and creative learning experience. It also gives liberty to students to choose what they want to learn and what they don’t want to. Also, it has no language barriers, open education- access to the wide array of study materials, interactive learning, vocabulary expansions are redefining the conventional learning practice in the digital days.

Further, the digitalization in education can tackle all the prevailing issues that come in the way of providing education in rural and remote areas. Along with that, pedagogical practice with digital medium helps to overcome the limits of space and time, digital literacy, technical skills and many others, and enhance students to incorporate digital skills at the young age. Moreover, shifting regular and the formulative styles of education into more competency-based approach would promote L&D (Learning and Development) to test skills such as critical thinking and analyzes, and conceptual clarity. Along with digital technologies, we will be able to reshape the conventional policies of education. Besides, redesigned learning spaces with the adoption of Artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VI), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality in classrooms improves the educational outcome to a significant level. Today gamification, virtual labs, and other customized learning experiences are highly improving the entire education methodologies. As a result of digitalization, relevant and contextual curriculum, effective pedagogy, high order thinking skills, rich and up-to-date content are renewing the traditional way of education. Therefore, implementing advanced educational practice and policies, that seemingly modify the ability of students in the digital age. But the digitalisation also induces quality issues in many ways such as external and internal processes of teaching and learning practice. Also, lack of equity, resources, community engagement, and the willingness of adoption towards innovation and new strategies restrict the overall involvement in educational organizations. Indeed, it requires greater enhancements to the future and present-day methodologies. Hence this blog aims to explore the reinventing educational practices and policies in the view of digitalization. This blog provides a supportive space for the researchers to discover distinct practices and policies of education in the view of digitalization to reshape the traditional practice. We welcome researchers and practitioners from various disciplines to present novel and innovative solutions against this background. The topic of interest for the blog include, but are not limited to, the following,

· Digital education reinventing pedagogical practice.

· Implementation of digital strategy in higher education.

· Reshaping education in the digital era.

· Sustainable management of digital transformation in education.

· Reinventing an equitable and resilient k-12 education system.

· Innovative ed-tech practices in education.

· New and emerging roles of technologies in education.

· Digital literacy in formal online education.

· Artificial intelligence in reinventing education.

· Fostering quality education: practices and policies.

· Education and skills in the digital age.

· Digital divide in education: challenges and opportunities.

· Technology enabled open education.

· Quality and versatility of digital technology in education.