Top Class: The OECD Education Policy Podcast | Teachers, PISA, Students

Children have probably spent more time online this year than they ever have before. Which is why the OECD’s newly adopted Recommendation on Children in the Digital Environment comes right in time. How much do children know about the privacy of their data? Or how to tell the difference between good and bad information? How do we deal with cyberbullying and hate content? Elizabeth Milovidov is an expert on digital parenting and children’s digital rights at the Council of Europe. Tracey Burns is a senior analyst at the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. She consulted on the OECD’s Recommendation on Children in the Digital Environment. It sets out the principles of a safe digital environment for children. Host: Clara Young; Producer: Taline Shahinian.

We’ve heard a great deal about what boosts our immune system during this pandemic. But what boosts our “commune” system? Michael Ungar, director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, Canada, discusses how community helps us through hard times. And as young people navigate through the pandemic and its aftermath, their resilience will serve them well – a resilience not of individual grit, but formed through the people around us. Host: Clara Young; Producer: Taline Shahinian.

If we looked into a crystal ball, what kinds of school would we see? Would classes be happening exclusively within school walls with a teacher in front and students in rows? Or would it be a robot conducting class? Would some school be online? Or would learning take place anytime and anywhere? The OECD has put together four scenarios of what the future of education might be. Keri Facer, Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol in the UK, and Tracey Burns, Senior Analyst in the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation and co-author of a new report Back to the Future of Education FOUR OECD SCENARIOS FOR SCHOOLING, talk about the future we want for schools… and the future we might get. Host: Clara Young Producer: Taline Shahinian

Remote schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic has opened our eyes to the difficulties of intersecting digital technologies and traditional schooling. Sanjay Sarma, who is Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, talks about online learning and how it can work hand-in-hand with teachers and students… with some serious cognitive science know-how.

Over the course of 2020, millions of students across the globe were unable to attend classes due to school closures, meaning that countries were forced to rely on emergency measures to keep learning going. Online classes were a popular choice in countries that had the technical capacity, but strategies differed between countries and depended heavily on the context of each area. In this podcast, we talk to Earl Phalen, Founder and CEO of George and Veronica Phalen Leadership Academies, Ryoko Tsuneyoshi, Professor of Comparative Education at the University of Tokyo, and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, Senior Analyst at the OECD, about how schools fared and what the situation was like in the United States and Japan in particular. To read more stories of how schools managed the crisis, visit oecdedutoday.com/coronavirus/#Continuity-stories

It could be said that there have been not one but two pandemics being propagated across the world over the past year. Alongside the spread of COVID-19 there has been an equally prolific spread of misinformation surrounding the origins, characteristics and treatments of the virus – some are calling it an “infodemic”. False information about the crisis fuels division and hinders government efforts to control the spread, especially in areas with already low levels of trust in government. The young are particularly vulnerable to being exposed to misinformation online, and it has become vital to support them in developing a critical eye when reading the news. But what is the best way of doing that? To find out we caught up with Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck, Founder and CEO of Lie Detectors, Amy Mitchell, Director of Journalism Research at Pew Research Center, and Francesco Avvisati, Senior Survey Methodology Specialist in the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills.

As schools closed across the globe due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems were forced to come face to face with the limitations of traditional schooling. In all sectors, technology picked up the slack when physical work environments became unfeasible, and education was no exception – technologies that were previously relegated to the fringes of pedagogical practice suddenly became the only way teaching and learning could take place. Coronavirus has rapidly accelerated society’s increasing reliance on technology, and any sector entrenched too deeply in the old industrial work organisation risks getting left behind. Is education one of them? Has the crisis exposed ways in which education simply isn’t up to date with the modern world? To discuss this, we caught up via teleconference with Wendy Kopp, CEO and Co-Founder of Teach For All, Roberto Benes, Director of Generation Unlimited, and Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills.

The transition from school to the world of work is one of the most pivotal moments in a young person’s life – it’s a time of high pressure and high uncertainty, and one that requires an equally high level of resilience to manage. Enter the coronavirus crisis, and suddenly this difficult transition gains a brand new set of complications. To discuss the current situation for school-leavers entering the job market, we caught up with Ingrid Schoon, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at the Institute of Education, University College London, and Anthony Mann, Senior Analyst at the OECD.

With schools closed around the world, students and teachers are having to find new ways of learning outside of the classroom. Meanwhile, governments are working hard to assess the impact of school closures and make plans for education in a post-crisis world – a world that may well be fundamentally altered. What have the government responses been like so far? Have they worked? And does the crisis imply that we need to change the way we educate the next generation? In this episode, we invited Fernando Reimers, Professor of the Practice in International Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO, to discuss the situation with Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the OECD.

The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in school closures in countries across the globe, forcing many students to continue their learning from home. The news is full of government responses and updates from political leaders, but comparatively little airtime is given to those affected most by school closures. What is the sudden switch to home learning actually like for a student? Does it work? What are the major challenges? To find out, we spoke to three high school students in three different countries, all of whom participate in the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 project: Ayumi Mitsui is a Japanese student currently at school in Viet Nam; Juyeop Kwon is a high school student in Korea; and Alessandra Policarpo is a Brazilian student finishing her last year of school in Germany. www.oecd.org/education/2030-project