AFINEF, the association that brings together digital companies for education and training since 2012, presents 15 proposals for an innovative, robust, and sovereign French sector. The goal is to provide teachers and students with quality resources that meet their needs and respect the protection of personal data.
Because digital education is a crucial issue for our youth and their future, and because teaching with and through digital technology is key to maintaining our country’s status as a recognized educational power, we call for strong ambition and concrete policies to successfully transform the digital landscape of schools and learning.
Challenges we must collectively address
Our republican promise is to provide children with a school capable of transmitting strong values, essential knowledge for personal development, skills necessary for social and professional integration, and awareness of major societal challenges. It is also a school capable of expanding possibilities and combating destiny inequalities.
Today, the challenges facing the Republic’s schools are numerous. Digital resources for education play a major role in supporting teachers, National Education staff, parents, and students.
They are a powerful tool to assist teachers in their professional practices and promote pedagogical innovation to enable students to better acquire fundamental knowledge in mathematics, French, and languages. They serve as a lever for teachers to facilitate education in orientation, media literacy, environmental awareness, community living, sexuality, etc.
That’s why we need to take a forward-looking approach, envision the future of education, and create the conditions for strengthening digital practices in learning.
- Develop digital skills for students and teachers.
- Meet the requirement of universal accessibility in education by leveraging digital tools to succeed in inclusive education.
- Use innovations proposed by digital resources in the field of career guidance to ensure the republican promise of equal opportunities.
- Promote the use of ethical AI to facilitate the individualization and personalization of learning paths and provide technical and technological assistance to teachers in their professional practices.
- Place ethics at the heart of solutions through all initiatives in the field of digital education. Promote gender diversity in the digital sector.
- Develop and structure the sector.
To meet the educational challenges our country faces, the state needs an innovative, robust, and competitive sector to ensure digital sovereignty and strengthen our country’s status as an educational power.
For these reasons, digital education companies expect the state to build a clear, ambitious, and multi-stakeholder policy that stimulates both the supply and demand, with the aim of establishing a sustainable market for digital education.
- Provide the means for the sector to develop and ensure sovereign digital education by building an ambitious multi-stakeholder policy and ensuring the adoption of a budgetary program commensurate with ambitions for the digital transformation of schools.
- Stimulate both the supply and demand for digital innovations to ensure their successful integration into educational institutions.
- To promote the adoption of digital technology by teachers in their pedagogical practices, we support the implementation of a « Pedagogical Resources Pass » dedicated to the acquisition of digital resources.
- Develop a community around the deployment of digital resources for education in schools, in which EdTech companies would have their place and could access the teaching community to promote digital resources in pedagogical practices and align with expressed needs on the ground.
- Make the public/private strategy transparent to avoid the risk of unfair competition from the state and the risk of being subjected to a non-European educational culture, notably by providing visibility over several years for the deployment of solutions developed and supported by the state.
- Establish conditions for innovation and collaborate with research to develop solutions, based in particular on didactic, neuroscience, and education science studies, and prioritize digital solutions that have a proven impact on learning.
- Promote the interoperability of digital educational solutions.
- Initiate a national study on digital uses by engaging researchers to assess and thoughtfully improve practices.
- Support the sector in its international dimension by implementing the necessary means for the development of a genuine national export strategy for EdTech.
Find the detailed proposals here: afinef.net
Source: AFINEF, “15 proposals to meet the challenges collectively” December 2023
