The pandemic is forcing schools in Germany to digitize themselves. A look at Estonia shows what needs to be considered in this process.

For over a year now, schools in Germany have had to switch to distance learning again and again. While the switch in this country was sometimes chaotic, especially at the beginning, it was comparatively easy for schools in the pioneering digital state of Estonia. In the past year, both countries got to know both the advantages and the downsides of their digitization strategies.

Estonia is a digital model country. The small Baltic country is known for its density of startups, enables virtually all administrative procedures online and also offers these services to its worldwide e-residents. Our author Helen Bielawa currently lives in Estonia and researches innovations in the public sector. In this series of articles she shows what is behind Estonia’s image and what Germany can learn from it.

In Estonia, digitization was part of everyday life even before the pandemic. Online platforms used by almost all Estonian schools have made an important contribution to this. The most widespread platforms are eKool and Stuudium.

When schools started distance learning last March, were we are well prepared.

In this way, students upload their homework and teachers upload their grades. Parents also have access to track their children’s learning progress.

“When schools started using started distance learning, we were well prepared, “says Laura Limperk-Kütaru, Head of the International Relations Department at the Estonian Ministry of Education. In Germany there is no uniform picture of the current situation. “Anyone who has already been digitally trained and equipped has made the switch well. The others have made a huge leap forward, ”says Christian Büttner, head of the Institute for Education and School Psychology of the City of Nuremberg. As chairman of the Alliance for Education, he advocates digital change in education.

Germany recognized the need to catch up and adopted the School Digital Pact in 2019. The federal government has made five billion euros available for digital educational infrastructure. Estonia, on the other hand, has been investing in digital infrastructure for decades. In 1996, then President Lennart Meri started the Tiigrihüpe (Tiger Leaping) program for digital education. Schools are now widely connected to the Internet, tablets are available to borrow if necessary, teachers have received further training.

When switching to distance learning during the pandemic, however, that did not help the Estonians. The schools were perfectly equipped, but the private households were not. Not all families had good internet access and enough devices for all children.

“We had the digital skills , the platforms, the tools and the mindset. But in the end it all came down to the infrastructure, ”says Laura Limperk-Kütaru. In Estonia, too, the government had to make adjustments and purchase more equipment for pupils in need.

There is more to digitization than the Internet, tablets and smartboards. “The digital is not an independent subject, but a form of learning. We have been following this logic for years, ”says Laura Limperk-Kütaru. Therefore, the further training of teachers had priority from the start.

Christian Büttner wishes the same for Germany. “There will no longer be a school like before Corona, but a new form of school after Corona,” he expects. With new learning methods that use digital tools sensibly, the meaning of the school as a living space will change.

There will be no school give more like before Corona.

A very promising model for a new way of learning is the so-called flipped or inverted classroom. The idea: Instead of receiving frontal input in class and practicing the content alone at home, it could also work the other way round. The children would acquire the knowledge at home with the help of videos, apps and digital learning content. In school they would then practice, discuss and deepen together.

In which cases concepts such as the flipped classroom make sense depends on the topic, grade and type of school. “I think the digital tools make teaching better, but there is no black or white. Doing everything digitally is not the right thing to do, and everything is not analog, “says Christian Büttner.

In his opinion, the teachers can make the best decision and no standard solution should be dictated from above. But the teachers have been left completely alone with this task in recent years. You don’t even know what offers are available. “In the end, everyone is currently using what they want,” Büttner sums it up.

Laura Limperk-Kütaru faces the same problem. In Estonia, too, it is the teachers who choose and use the individual tools. And there, too, there is a confusing variety of apps, YouTube channels and online platforms. Therefore, in addition to the pioneering schools, there are also latecomers in Estonia who do not make use of the digital possibilities.

Two countries with very different starting positions are currently facing the same problem. Christian Büttner and Laura Limperk-Kütaru independently developed the same idea for a solution: a Code of Conduct. A kind of Tüv for digital education is supposed to test the safety and reliability of content and software in schools and education. That would preserve the variety of tools and leave the decision-making authority with the teachers, but relieve them of the responsibility for data protection and quality.

In parallel to such a set of rules, Estonia wants to develop a platform on which teachers can search for suitable tools. Together with the product standards, the platform would empower teachers to design the digitization of the school themselves.

In addition to data protection and functionality, there is a third aspect that should be regulated in a code of conduct for digital educational software: interoperability. The applications must have standardized interfaces so that content from different publishers can be used in one platform and data can be transferred when changing schools.

In Estonia, at least the larger providers are one step further on this point, says Laura Limperk-Kütaru. Based on the national X-Road infrastructure and digital identity, they use Estonia’s so-called Educational ID. Schoolchildren use it to log into their learning platforms. The infrastructures that Estonia has developed since the 90s also help in the current situation.

“We started digitizing schools in the mid-90s because we realized that we were doing it Open access to the whole world “, Laura Limperk-Kütaru looks back at the time after independence from the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, the pandemic also acted as a burning glass for problem areas in Estonia. Both Estonia and Germany can learn from this: Decentralized, local decisions about the use of digital tools make sense in the education sector; but with such a sensitive and important topic as education, national standards are still necessary as a guide and security guarantee.

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