- Three leading global organizations – OECD, IEEE Standards Association and DQ Institute announced the new platform for digital coordination, Coalition for Digital Intelligence (CDI)
- CDI will serve as a coordinating platform for organizations implementing a common set of standards and definitions for digital intelligence across the technology and education sectors, allowing digital intelligence to be better tracked and understood.
- Digital Intelligence refers to the set of competencies necessary for digital life today, and includes basic digital skills and digital literacy.
- More information at www.wef.ch/SDI18 and follow the conversation at #wefimpact
Geneva and New York, 25 September 2018 – During the World Economic Forum Sustainable Development Impact Summit in New York, three leading global organizations—the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the IEEE Standards Association, and the DQ Institute today announced their engagement in the Coalition for Digital Intelligence (CDI), a platform for coordinating efforts on raising Digital Intelligence across the technology and education sectors. The platform is supported by the World Economic Forum.
Each year, the world economy invests billions of dollars in developing digital literacy and digital skills. However, these efforts are not well coordinated, with many companies, governments, and organizations each running their respective programs under their own frameworks. There are countless global, national, and organizational efforts to create frameworks that classify digital skills and digital literacy.
This means that there is no globally shared understanding of what terms like digital skills and digital literacy mean. As used today, they can refer to competencies that range from typing and web-browsing, to using social media platforms, to administering vendor-specific database products to writing software.
Lack of a shared understanding leads to uncoordinated monitoring and reporting. There is no shared baseline understanding of the level of digital skills in the world today, and as such it is difficult to address how to improve and sustain them. CDI is grounded in an agreement that the world could build basic digital skills and digital literacy more efficiently and effectively if there was increased coordination around a common set of definitions and standards.
An international think-tank, the DQ Institute, has used an academically rigorous process to aggregate over 20 leading frameworks from around the world. The resulting framework, called Digital Intelligence (DQ), includes eight comprehensive areas deemed necessary for digital life today. They include not just the technical skills that one might expect, but also abilities related to digital safety, digital rights, and digital emotional intelligence. These capacities allow people to not just use a computer or smartphone, but to deal with modern social and economic challenges such as identity theft, screen addiction, online privacy, and the spread of digital misinformation. DQ thus brings together education agendas of digital literacies, with industry efforts to develop digital skills: encompassing digital citizenship, digital resilience, media and information literacy, job readiness, entrepreneurship, and more. The DQ framework is further built on the OECD’s Education 2030 Learning Framework to create a guide for nations to develop their national education and policies on digital intelligence.
“Technology is only meaningful when it enhances humanness. In the age of AI and hyper-connectivity, Digital Intelligence (DQ) is a comprehensive set of technical, cognitive, social, and emotional digital competencies that are grounded in ethics and human values,” said Dr. Yuhyun Park, Founder of DQ Institute.
If Digital Intelligence is to become a global framework that allows for better coordination and the scalability of digital skills training, there must be a unique way of working across the education and the technology worlds, and both schools and the technology community have a significant role to play in building Digital Intelligence.
“The development of Digital Intelligence is not ad hoc,” said Melissa Sassi, co-chair of the IEEE Digital Literacy Industry Connections Program. “It should be a paradigm with a focus toward technical excellence and deployment through the collaboration of many forms around the world. We see the opportunity to enable the build of Digital Intelligence into product and software design from the onset through the use of global standards that include agreed upon common definitions and take into account various contexts. It will also enable improved practices and processes toward the development of indicators and measurement.”
The CDI will serve as a platform for coordinating efforts on raising Digital Intelligence across the technology and education sectors. Initial efforts of the Coalition include institutionalizing the DQ framework, which will be done through a formal adoption process with the OECD and by the development of an IEEE technical standard. The CDI will then help to organize implementation groups around each of these: a multi-stakeholder coalition of firms to promote and implement the IEEE standard, and a similar group built around a coalition of education ministers to implement the guidelines created by OECD.
“In a world where the kinds of things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitize and automate, we need to work harder to pair the artificial intelligence of computers with the human capabilities that will empower individuals to fully capitalize on new technologies. This makes the Coalition for Digital Intelligence so important and the OECD is privileged to contribute, through its Education 2030 Learning Framework, a common language and methodology to this work,” said Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the OECD.
The CDI will establish a common reporting framework for each group, and hold summits that bring the groups together to talk about shared progress and identify the needs that each community has in relation to the other. These results feedback into the DQ framework, which is regularly updated in response to both feedback from implementers and to technological change.
The World Economic Forum, Sustainable Development Impact Summit in New York on24-25 September aims to drive solutions for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Paris Agreement on climate change.
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