Unlimited learning. From anywhere.
Ericsson is creating a world of limitless connectivity, making it possible to reach and empower students everywhere, like never before. With immersive learning experiences and access to quality training, acquiring new skills and knowledge will become an enriching lifelong journey for everyone.
Education holds the key to a better future
Imagine a future in which everyone, everywhere, has access to the world’s best education. Imagine no limits, no exclusions: old, young, rich, poor, from the mega-cities to remote hillside villages - fully connected schools to fully connected students learning from anywhere. A future of connectivity bringing complete equity and inclusivity to universal learning. It sounds like a dream, but in a world where digital innovation will complement and evolve classroom learning, it’s possible.
Ericsson is a proud member of the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development. Our work focuses on bridging the digital divide to reach under-served and under-privileged communities, and supports the UN Secretary General's Roadmap for Digital Cooperation as a platform to reimagine education.
Today, 260 million children aged 5 - 16 receive no schooling. Hear more from Doreen on how we can leverage digital technologies and tools to combat this challenge together.
The world needs better access to quality education
Today, over a billion children attend some form of class every day. That’s a triumph. But 260 million 5-16 year-old children receive no schooling at all (source: UNESCO). That’s a huge problem which urgently needs to be addressed. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic (which exposed serious global shortcomings in accessibility to online learning) has hit the education of over 1.5 billion 16-25 year-olds worldwide. This could result in the younger generation experiencing a US$10 trillion loss of lifetime earnings. For individuals that is tragic, and for the global economy, it is devastating (source: World Bank).
Ericsson is the first global UNICEF partner engaged with school connectivity mapping. This supports the Giga initiative’s ultimate goal to connect every school to the internet by 2030.
Since 2019, Giga has mapped nearly 1 million schools.
Unleashing our educational superpowers
The journey to realizing the power of digital innovation in education starts with digital literacy. By being equipped with the knowledge and skills to engage with the digital world, teachers will become empowered to transform the learning experience, and pupils become able to embrace it. Afterall, mobile technology in education enables digital learning and this unleashes our educational superpowers. Whether that’s personalized learning, collaboration and co-creation, or offering greater flexibility over when, where and how to engage with learning and allowing students to study in flexible ways which suit them – it’s all possible. When technology connects us, extraordinary things become a reality.
Ericsson’s Digital Lab is already inspiring youth in communities across South Africa, India, China, Sweden, US and Italy to prepare for a 5G future.
Reimagining teaching and learning
Armed with the power of connectivity, schools and universities are reimagining what it means to teach and what it means to learn. Teachers are being empowered to vary their teaching strategies to help engage their students by adopting more customized and tailor-made learning experiences for diverse students. We are even seeing the emergence of initiatives like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), feeding the growing hunger for online adult learning. However, there’s still a great deal more to do. By 2030, the target year set by the UN to achieve its Sustainable Development Goals, digital learning will have redrawn the landscape for building tomorrow’s skills today.
The amazing world of experiential learning
Incorporating augmented, virtual and mixed reality, eXtended Reality (XR) is capable of creating immersive learning experiences of unprecedented richness and depth. With Digital Twin technology it’s becoming possible to create full-scale virtual replicas of almost anything that’s ever existed for students to explore. The arrival of the ‘Internet of Senses’ – where through haptic technology we can experience touch or smell online – means wherever you are in the world, you can tour Pompeii and touch its artefacts. You can roam the streets of London before the Great Fire – or during it. You can walk with dinosaurs. Not only is it amazing – it’s powerful too.
Since 2018, Ericsson has been using VR for teacher training, which allows teachers to practice integrating ICT into their day-to-day classroom teaching - even when they are away from the physical classroom.
Education at the speed of you
The traditional infrastructure of the educational world will be augmented by new immersive, virtual spaces, leading to the emergence of a hybrid learning environment, which balances the essential qualities of face-to-face learning with the new potential of digital technologies, underpinned by limitless connectivity.
Digital skills for life, work and lifelong learning
As digital platforms will increasingly be the basis of future work and opportunity, those without adequate digital skills to operate these platforms will not be as competitive in the workforce in the future.
The growing gap between the demand and availability for digital skills in the labor market calls for strong public-private action to address the issue of a digitally divided society. On the other hand, digital transformation of economies and industries, with the uptake of automation and AI driven processes, will transform the human driven job activities. It will also open the opportunity to center them on more meaningful, creative, and socially relevant types of tasks, that machines are less effective at executing.
With data analytics and cloud-based instruction and advice, Digital Teaching Assistants and other AI tools will allow lessons and course materials to be customized and individualized.
With teachers able to be ‘present’ anywhere via holographic avatars, you’ll have access to the best teaching skills anywhere in the world, from wherever in the world you happen to be. With advanced real-time translation technology language barriers will fade away. All of this will democratize access and make high-quality education much more accessible for all.
