DEEP aims to promote educational equity in the digital era. Its ambition is to clarify how we can improve learning experiences and outcomes for all children, regardless of their social and cultural backgrounds and acknowledging their diverse talents, needs, and interests. Our objective is to provide relevant and actionable knowledge on both the potential benefits and the possible harms of digitization in relation to educational inequalities.
To this end, we conduct research on various aspects of digital transformation in Swiss primary education, gather national and international expertise and findings, and engage in translational activities with practice partners such as Staatslabor and proEdu.
Our work builds on decades of research into patterns and mechanisms of disadvantage in school education. While extensive research exists on these issues, there is still very little understanding of how digital transformation affects these dynamics, despite its likely far-reaching impact. The digital era does not only change the tools used for learning, but also implies completely new skills needed to participate in society and succeed in life and changes where, when, and how learning takes place. These changes also impact the roles and responsibilities of teachers and schools and what they need to best fulfill their tasks.
All of these aspects of the digital transformation of learning and education touch on questions of equity and inequality. Among the topics addressed across DEEP projects are inequalities stemming from differences in access to technology, readiness to use digital tools, participation in digital learning, and the quality of learning opportunities.
In DEEP, we use the notion of equity as an umbrella concept that relates to all of these issues and is used in combination with other theoretical lenses and concepts such as bias, fairness, inclusion, diversity, and discrimination.
The overall impact of DEEP will come not only from the insights of individual projects but also from integrating and synthesizing findings across the consortium. This combined knowledge can inform the development of practical tools, such as guidelines (e.g. on how to implement technologically enhanced differentiation in everyday classroom situations) and open educational resources (for example to improve data and algorithm literacy), to support equitable digital learning practices.
By addressing these challenges proactively, DEEP aims to ensure that Switzerland's digital transformation in education becomes a catalyst for greater equity rather than a source of new disparities, ultimately benefiting all children across the Swiss educational landscape.
