Youth and students call for technology to be on their terms

Youth and students call for technology to be on their terms


The youth edition of the 2023 GEM Report on technology in education, released last week during Digital Learning Week in Paris, calls for governments to ensure that decisions about technology in education place learners’ best interests at the center.  

The event brought together young people from Canada, Denmark, France, South Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe to discuss what technology in their terms would look like. Moderated by Restless Development and with a keynote presentation from Rémy Buisine from Brut., a French online news platform  targeting young people, the event concluded with a call to action from the Executive Director of the Global Student Forum inviting youth and students to support the campaign #TechOnOurTerms.

© UNESCO / Sacha HERON

The 2024 Youth Report is a result of an extensive consultation process in partnership with Restless Development involving over 1,500 youth and students across 8 regions. The consultations invited participants to reflect on the key challenges and opportunities for the use of technology in education in their regions through the lens of the recommendation of the global report. 

While information and communication technology (ICT) has been used for 100 years in education, the increased use of digital technology and recent breakthroughs in AI have brought to the table the debate about the transformative power of technology in education. Young people from around the world asked for governments to view technology not as the solution, but as a supportive tool in overcoming certain barriers to education access, quality and efficiency. They called for greater consultation with youth in the design, implementation and evaluation of technology in education. Their views on how technology works in practice are key to making sure decisions respond to need. Framed as a call to action, young people describe in this report what technology on their terms would look like. 

They told us that, for technology to be on their terms, governments need to:  

  1. Make it equitable! The use of technology in education continues to grow. In 2021, there were at least 220 million students in massive open online courses, while Wikipedia had 244 million page views a day. Among young people, three in four people use the internet globally, ranging from 39% in low-income to 99% in high-income. But despite progress in access, digital divides persist. Youth called for technology to be  affordable. They also called on government to work jointly with young people to develop personalized learning approaches and to reduce barriers to girls’ access to technology products and services.
  2. Make it appropriate! Nearly 90% of the content in higher education repositories with open educational resources (OER) collections was created in Europe and Northern America, with 92% of the content in the OER commons is in English. Youth asked for technology to be appropriate by making education content suitable for the local context and languages, for youth and teachers to be trained, for youth to be involved in decisions about the design, implementation and evaluation of technology in education. Globally, only 16% of countries have adopted legislation to prevent and act on cyberbullying with a focus on education. Youth called for governments to monitor the impact of technology on well-being and on the privacy and safety of young people when online.

Involving young people through consultations and in the decisions that ultimately affect them can ensure that decisions made about the use of technology places their interests at the centre. By partnering with young people as experts in the consultations and production of this report, their voices will be elevated to be heard by government officials responsible for education policy. Their call to be heard in policy design echoes their youth power and resonates through this publication: ‘Nothing about us, without us!’ 





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