The Digital Standards Development was informed by a thorough literature review to ground the work in evidence-based research, existing policies and best-practice.

The Digital Standards were created by volunteers, participating in 2 roundtable events and 23 online meetings. This produced different iterations of the draft standards that everyone voted on.

Project Overview

The Digital Standards Development Project is an initiative of the British Council, the Department of Education, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

The British Council is supporting the DBE to develop Digital Standards for the basic education sector.

The Department of Basic Education drives the project's development and implementation.

The project is funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

What is the goal?

The Digital Standards Project is a collaborative co-creative process that draws together diverse stakeholders from the education sector to develop digital standards for learning and teaching in South Africa's schools and beyond.

Why digital standards?

The White Paper on e-Education (2004) provided South African education with a vision and long-term goals to implement digital learning in all education spaces. We need digital standards for different role players and for institutions to operationalise the White Paper in a practical and contextually relevant way.

What are standards?

Standards are different to policies. Policies provide long-term goals, visions and guidance to entire corporations or countries. Standards operationalise policies in short-term or medium-term goals that target specific role players or institutional functions and processes. This project develops digital standards to operationalise the guidelines from the White Paper.

Policies

  • Long-term, high-level guidance
  • Drive by legal concerns and regulations
  • Prioritises goals, objectives and roles

Standards

  • Procedures, rules or technical controls to operationalise policies
  • May be short- , medium- or long-term
  • For individual / groups / whole organisation

Draft Standards

The standards for Learners, Educators and Leaders were developed using the Digital Capital Map as theoretical lens. Read more about this in the  DSD Input Document.

DSD Presentations & Talks

Radio Interview on UNISA Radio, 10 Nov 2023

UNISA radio invited Dr Tarling to share the digital standards project with a wider UNISA audience.

Join the conversation on:

https://iono.fm/s/207 

10 November 2023 @ 10am

RED Conference @ UNISA, 6 & 7 Nov 2023

The RED team focuses on Reconfiguring Education for a Digital World. Team members are spread across different parts of the world and come from Argentina and Mexico, South Africa, Germany and Sweden, all working to better understand how education can respond to the challenges of digital learning in an inclusive and just way. Dr Tarling presented the work done on the digital standards in a 2 hour workshop to almost 50 teachers, principals and academics. She used a Menti to engage the group and encourage thinking-together and co-learning. 

Keynote at the ECEL @ UNISA, 27 Oct 2023

The European Conference on eLearning is presented in different countries around the world each year, and this year the UNISA Pretoria campus hosted this wonderful event. Dr Tarling presented the work on the conference, using the analogy of creating a whole new language for all of South Africa to explain the complexity of the Digital Standards development. 

REMGRO Principals Conference

The REMGRO Principals Conference organisers invited Dr Isabel Tarling to present the DSD Project to principals from their various projects. The slide deck is included below as a window in time of where the project was a this point in its development. It's of course moved on already!

 

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