Digital education: Connotation, pathway, and trend

The essence of digital education encompasses data-driven approaches, human-technology integration, virtuality and reality combination, and opening up and sharing. Data-driven methods emphasize the use of data to advance teaching and learning; human-technology integration combines human intelligence with technological means to create flexible, efficient, and personalized educational experiences; virtuality and reality combination offers learning environments that support diverse and blended educational models; and opening up and sharing promote the sharing of resources, technology, teaching, and societal engagement.

The pathway to developing digital education includes creating new scenarios, providing new resources, exploring new models, establishing new evaluations, and cultivating new competencies. Creating new scenarios involves expanding learning spaces, transforming learning methods, and enhancing learning experiences; providing new resources includes opening up resources, immersive resources, interactive resources, and intelligent resources; exploring new models encompasses blended learning, collaborative learning, and personalized learning models; establishing new evaluations involves transitioning from manual to machine assessments and broadening assessment content; and cultivating new competencies includes developing teachers’ digital literacy and students’ digital skills.

Future trends in digital education include personalized teaching, data-driven management, privacy and security protection, and ethical considerations. Personalized teaching will utilize AI and digital technologies to offer more personalized learning experiences; data-driven management will use big data and intelligent technologies to support educational decision-making; privacy and security protection will establish comprehensive data privacy protection systems to ensure the safety and privacy of educational data; ethical considerations will focus on students’ ethical awareness and social responsibility in the digital age, promoting the healthy development of digital education.

Digital education is a burgeoning and critical innovation direction in the field of education, driven by technological advancements, policy support, and scientific research. China has made significant progress and accumulated valuable experience in this area, such as the implementation of the national education digitalization strategy , the construction of the Smart Education of China, the active promotion of “Internet + education,” and the acceleration of educational digitization and intelligent upgrade. Additionally, some universities are actively exploring practices, such as Central China Normal University in Wuhan innovating in digital teaching models in geography, literature, modern education technology, and music education.

However, digital education also faces risks and challenges in its development, such as data security and privacy protection, ethical care, and humanistic concerns. Therefore, governments, educational institutions, educators, and enterprises should work together to increase investment and support for digital education, promote its further development, and simultaneously address and resolve these issues to ensure the healthy and sustainable development of digital education.

The key to promoting digital education lies in fostering educational equity, ensuring high-quality education, practicing green education, and adopting an open and collaborative educational model. By breaking through the constraints of time and space, educational equity increases the availability of high-quality resources, reduces costs, and further promotes balanced distribution of educational opportunities; high-quality education creates intelligent and personalized learning scenarios, integrates online and offline teaching, and innovates talent cultivation models; green education achieves efficient use of educational resources and environmental protection, promoting sustainable educational development; open and collaborative education fosters the exchange of global learning experiences, establishes open innovation platforms, and forms an integrated learning environment.

The work titled “Digital Education: Connotation, Pathway, and Trend”, was published on Frontiers of Digital Education (published on July 2, 2024).