Shilongo Eliphas Shilongo
Digital transformation is a series of profound and coordinated philosophy, workforce and technology shifts that enable new educational and operating models and transform the entire settings of educational operations, strategic directions for adults educations, key players and value proposals.
It is the process of using digital technologies to create new or modify existing, processes of adult education approaches and pedagogy, assessments, learning culture and curriculum settings of adult education to meet and conform to current users of digital platforms.
Equally important, digital transformation brings immense benefits to our everyday life, such as improving the efficiency of learning and productivity, quality teaching and learning, as well as assessment and evaluations that are data driven.
Moreover, digital adult education can eliminate redundancy and save costs of processes.
Adult learners have a crucial role to play in developing digitalised education, but these competencies require a properly planned intervention of the key players in formal and informal education platforms collectively.
The field of adult education, under the ministry, has to increasingly deal with a target group that is being exposed to digital transformation while not being sufficiently equipped to understand digital transformation in its aspects to gain optimal results.
Developing digital competence goes far beyond media literacy and critical thinking development, but it pre-requires the entire field of adult education to be confident and able to understand and develop learning concepts that address the societal issues, democratic challenges and dimensions relating to digital transformation in its full range to correspond to inclusivity.
Above all, it is adult education programme promotors and curriculum designers who should develop suitable and accessible technology forums and training to realise this emerging change of technologies is achieved.
This exercise will assist promoters to be unconfined from administrative burdens to dedicate more time to creating and promoting digital educational materials and methodologies to upgrade all the pedagogical aspects of adult education.
Adult learners should get a quality and reliable education that eases the explanation process and helps them to concentrate by excluding any side stimuli.
Furthermore, a modified approach to learning will ease the learning process, quick answers to the questions and necessary information delivered by the chatbot and other self-directed strategies – all of those adult learners will get along with artificial intelligence that will be used during the process of change.
Availability of checked and secured material all the time will be made possible with cloud technologies to help the transformation.
In the prologue, the digital transformation of adult education should start with strategies.
Vibrant defined strategies that leverage opportunities presented by the new-fangled technologies while meeting the objectives of the ministry of education.
These stepladders should be used by all key players to develop a digital transformation strategy for adult education, connect everything to support tomorrow’s digital world set up strong strategic partnerships and build an ecosystem connecting your people, processes things to build a communications network that is a high capacity, secure and smart, deploy analytics to automate, understand as well as save money to use in real life, real-time data to drive strategic initiatives that improve performance, roll out upgrades and make infrastructure decisions.
More flexible and simpler to manage than traditional systems may just be the ticket for the whole formal and informal education.
Move towards a single, simple platform whether it is on-premises or in the cloud; the ultimate goal of digital transformation is to provide a single platform as the foundation of your network and communications infrastructure to run adult education effectively for all.
Nonetheless, digital transformation requires more than access, capabilities and meaningful services and content; other factors such as a stable social and economic environment and the motivation for change are fundamental to include those marginalised communities that suffer most from the digital world.
Women, the elderly, racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, rural populations and those of low socioeconomic status should be encouraged to learn digitally.
Obstacles that prevent these groups from becoming digital citizens should be dealt with at all levels of the ministry of education.
Research converges on four aspects, such as lack of the required digital skills, lack of confidence, lack of motivation and poor design of online services and content could all be collaboratively addressed to inclusively have all types of learners on board.
* Shilongo Eliphas Shilongo is a specialist in education and business management. He is a PhD candidate, focusing on the digitalisation of adult education at the University of Namibia. - eshilongo53@gmail.com