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What lessons can be learned from the "Digital Educational Territories" experiment for educational continuity?

Published on 09 September 2022
Update on 26 September 2022
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Summary

The program " Educational digital territories" program (TNE), launched in 2020 by the Ministry of National Education and the General Secretariat for Investment (SGPI) and implemented by the Banque des Territoires with partner local authorities, in association with the Réseau Canopé and the GIP Trousse à Projets, was intended to allow for large-scale testing of the implementation of educational continuity, the need for which had been revealed by the COVID-19 health crisis.

The TNE scheme, which concerns both public and private education under contract, is based on eight coordinated measures:

  • ensure a minimum level of digital equipment for elementary schools;
  • Equip each classroom (first and second degree) with a hybrid teaching kit;
  • to allow the equipment of the pupils of the elementary classes in state of digital fracture in the form of loan;
  • train all teachers in hybrid teaching;
  • provide teachers with a range of online services and resources via a platform;
  • Equip new teachers in primary and secondary schools (1,000 new teachers, then the others);
  • train parent volunteers on the challenges of digital education;
  • Evaluate the system, measuring its relevance and efficiency.
By piloting the simultaneous deployment of a digital training plan, the provision of educational resources and the digital equipment of students and teachers, the partners of the experimentation expect :
  • transforming teachers' teaching practices in order to have an effect on students' learning strategies;
  • guaranteeing pedagogical continuity in the event of a break in classroom teaching and thus contributing to the resilience of the education system in the event of a crisis;
  • to evaluate the relevance and feasibility of extending the experiment to other territories, or even its generalization to the whole country.
The TNE evaluation report draws the first lessons from the experiments conducted in the departments of Aisne and Val-d'Oise during the 2020-2021 school year.

Four levers

As an extension of the General Assembly on Digital Education (EGN), the objective of this demonstrator was to evaluate the feasibility of deploying the program and its ability to achieve its objectives.

The TNE program followed the experience of the School's stakeholders during the health crisis. This period had revealed " delays or shortcomings leading, in particular, to the use of emergency solutions that were sometimes problematic in terms of sovereignty and respect for personal data" .

The TNE program is thus based on four levers. The first three are equipment, teacher training and the provision of digital resources for learning. They are well known and have structured several previous plans and programs. The fourth lever activated by the TNE project was more innovative, both in content and form. "The implementation of a support for parents so that they can themselves accompany their children in the school use of digital techniques proposes a re-reading of the problem of co-education, that is to say the role and place of parents in the school.

Strong support from the educational community and disillusionment with its implementation

The evaluation report, carried out by researchers from the Techné (University of Poitiers) and Bonheurs (Cergy Paris University) teams, presents the following results:
  • a success in terms of reducing the backlog of equipment despite a difficult implementation;
  • a notable weakness in terms of available digital teaching and learning resources and their use;
  • training that is unequal between territories, incomplete, poorly adapted to the constraints and realities of the field, with a dissemination model that needs to be reviewed.
"The feelings expressed by the educational community during this initial phase of deployment of the demonstrator are ambivalent," summarize the authors of the evaluation report. "They show both strong support for the founding principles of the program and disillusionment with its implementation. This distortion is often reinforced by previous experiences in which the concrete reality did not correspond to the promises made by the programs.

Uneven digital skills among teachers 

A majority of teachers consider themselves technically competent (69%) and even more so pedagogically competent (73%) in the use of digital techniques at school, and the statistical correlation is inversely proportional to seniority.

"This should not mask the 30% of teachers who declare themselves incompetent, nor all the shortcomings declared despite everything by those who consider themselves competent, because the cross-tabulation between these two responses shows an overlap rate of less than 70%, i.e., less than 70% of teachers consider themselves technically AND pedagogically competent."

Many of them are not satisfied with their initial and/or ongoing professional training in digital education (83%). They feel that they have hardly ever had any (64%), that the training they have received is too short (30%), too far removed from their needs in the field (27%) or does not correspond to the equipment they have (24%).

"For most teachers, their skills were built through experience, through self-directed learning and, sometimes, through peer-to-peer training.

However, the authors of the report add, "the question of teacher professional development in the context of the TNE program cannot be posed simply in terms of the transfer of knowledge - although it is important to do so - but questions the construction of learning organizations where knowledge and practices are co-constructed .

Beyond the skills they lack, "many of the teachers we met expressed a certain disorientation, due to the lack of a general framework to guide their pedagogical choices regarding the use of available equipment and resources. The equipment and digital resources reach them (within the framework of the TNE demonstrator) without being part of an individual or school pedagogical project.

High expectations for equipment and connectivity

"Despite previous efforts to equip schools by the state and communities, the level of equipment prior to TNE is most often insufficient, both to meet the needs of emergency pedagogical continuity and to engage in the digital transition of education that schools need."
  • More than 40% of teachers report a lack of equipment and more than 30% underline that the equipment already installed is often obsolete. It is therefore essential to massively equip schools.
  • The lack of equipment and connectivity is partially compensated by a BYOD situation where teachers bring equipment to school. It should be noted that 8.62% of the teachers go as far as using a personal video-projection device at school.
  • On the other hand, teachers rarely request the use of students' personal equipment. Unlike in secondary and higher education, this is a marginal practice. 91% of them never do it and only 2% say they do it often or always.
  • In addition, the equipment of some families is insufficient to organize school work at home and the provision of TNE equipment for home school use raises many questions and difficulties (eligibility, ownership of equipment and insurance, loan modalities...)
  • Students' testimonies underline the precariousness of their access to family digital equipment and report that their use is often distracting.
"The equipment of students at home is however a major issue, especially in case of closure of classes and/or schools. It is one of the major proposals of the TNE device, and probably one of the most difficult to succeed because the identification of the families to be equipped is complex and raises ethical and legal questions".

"The equipment of teachers at home has also been reported for years as a major difficulty in the digital transition of teaching practices. More than two thirds of the teachers in the two departments declare that they are not sufficiently well equipped to work at home (65%). Among them, 29% were able to benefit from equipment made available to them by the school. This leaves about half of the teachers who are poorly equipped at home.

On the other hand, more than two-thirds of them say they are comfortable working at home (70%).

Rethinking resource policy based on usage

The evaluation confirms and underlines the singularity of the needs of elementary school in terms of digital educational resources. " The resources already available through national systems (...) are used by only 10% of teachers. In addition to the fact that these resources, despite their quality, are insufficiently known by teachers, they do not fully meet the requirements of elementary school.

The deployment of Digital Work Environments (DWEs), an important focus of state policy, particularly within the various versions of the educational continuity plan, is very uneven in the two departments of the demonstrator.

When an ENT exists, it is not necessarily used by all the teachers in the school and many families have difficulty connecting to it (inadequate equipment, insufficient connectivity, loss of logins and passwords, lack of skills).

Supporting parents and building a place for them in the school

This part of the TNE system was the most original and probably the most complex to deploy.
  • "The territorial networking work to identify the actors on the ground likely to act with parents is considerable. It is underway but will take time to be fully deployed with effectiveness.
  • "Everyone's expectations are very high on this part of the project.
  • Some of the teachers were concerned about a possible increase in their workload if they were given a new mission of steering or coordinating actions in favour of parents. "This observation underlines, if it were necessary, that the place of parents in the school remains an institutional blind spot and that we can expect much from the TNE program to remedy this.
The evaluation concludes with six recommendations:
  • "Give time to the actors in the field, develop a project culture;
  • Betting on bottom-up innovation;
  • Rethinking teacher professional development by articulating the provision of expertise and method with support for learning communities;
  • Revisit the theme of educational continuity;
  • Contribute to the development of a shared data culture;
  • Give scientific evaluation its place and build it upstream."
According to the Banque des Territoires, its total financing 200 million by the end of 2021: 27.3 million for the first two experiments launched in 2020 in Aisne and Val-d'Oise and 172 million for the ten new departments (Bouches-du-Rhône, Cher, South Corsica, Doubs, Finistère, Guadeloupe, Hérault, Isère, Vosges and Vienne), chosen, according to the Ministry of Education, " sothat the experimentation is the most representative of the diversity of the economic, geographical, sociological and technological realities of our territories in terms of digital accessibility."

Références :

Sources

What lessons can be learned from the "Digital Educational Territories" experiment for educational continuity?

The program " Educational digital territories" program (TNE), launched in 2020 by the Ministry of National Education and the General Secretariat for Investment (SGPI) and implemented by the Banque des Territoires with partner local authorities, in association with the Réseau Canopé and the GIP Trousse à Projets, was intended to allow for large-scale testing of the implementation of educational continuity, the need for which had been revealed by the COVID-19 health crisis.

The TNE scheme, which concerns both public and private education under contract, is based on eight coordinated measures:

  • ensure a minimum level of digital equipment for elementary schools;
  • Equip each classroom (first and second degree) with a hybrid teaching kit;
  • to allow the equipment of the pupils of the elementary classes in state of digital fracture in the form of loan;
  • train all teachers in hybrid teaching;
  • provide teachers with a range of online services and resources via a platform;
  • Equip new teachers in primary and secondary schools (1,000 new teachers, then the others);
  • train parent volunteers on the challenges of digital education;
  • Evaluate the system, measuring its relevance and efficiency.
By piloting the simultaneous deployment of a digital training plan, the provision of educational resources and the digital equipment of students and teachers, the partners of the experimentation expect :
  • transforming teachers' teaching practices in order to have an effect on students' learning strategies;
  • guaranteeing pedagogical continuity in the event of a break in classroom teaching and thus contributing to the resilience of the education system in the event of a crisis;
  • to evaluate the relevance and feasibility of extending the experiment to other territories, or even its generalization to the whole country.
The TNE evaluation report draws the first lessons from the experiments conducted in the departments of Aisne and Val-d'Oise during the 2020-2021 school year.

Four levers

As an extension of the General Assembly on Digital Education (EGN), the objective of this demonstrator was to evaluate the feasibility of deploying the program and its ability to achieve its objectives.

The TNE program followed the experience of the School's stakeholders during the health crisis. This period had revealed " delays or shortcomings leading, in particular, to the use of emergency solutions that were sometimes problematic in terms of sovereignty and respect for personal data" .

The TNE program is thus based on four levers. The first three are equipment, teacher training and the provision of digital resources for learning. They are well known and have structured several previous plans and programs. The fourth lever activated by the TNE project was more innovative, both in content and form. "The implementation of a support for parents so that they can themselves accompany their children in the school use of digital techniques proposes a re-reading of the problem of co-education, that is to say the role and place of parents in the school.

Strong support from the educational community and disillusionment with its implementation

The evaluation report, carried out by researchers from the Techné (University of Poitiers) and Bonheurs (Cergy Paris University) teams, presents the following results:
  • a success in terms of reducing the backlog of equipment despite a difficult implementation;
  • a notable weakness in terms of available digital teaching and learning resources and their use;
  • training that is unequal between territories, incomplete, poorly adapted to the constraints and realities of the field, with a dissemination model that needs to be reviewed.
"The feelings expressed by the educational community during this initial phase of deployment of the demonstrator are ambivalent," summarize the authors of the evaluation report. "They show both strong support for the founding principles of the program and disillusionment with its implementation. This distortion is often reinforced by previous experiences in which the concrete reality did not correspond to the promises made by the programs.

Uneven digital skills among teachers 

A majority of teachers consider themselves technically competent (69%) and even more so pedagogically competent (73%) in the use of digital techniques at school, and the statistical correlation is inversely proportional to seniority.

"This should not mask the 30% of teachers who declare themselves incompetent, nor all the shortcomings declared despite everything by those who consider themselves competent, because the cross-tabulation between these two responses shows an overlap rate of less than 70%, i.e., less than 70% of teachers consider themselves technically AND pedagogically competent."

Many of them are not satisfied with their initial and/or ongoing professional training in digital education (83%). They feel that they have hardly ever had any (64%), that the training they have received is too short (30%), too far removed from their needs in the field (27%) or does not correspond to the equipment they have (24%).

"For most teachers, their skills were built through experience, through self-directed learning and, sometimes, through peer-to-peer training.

However, the authors of the report add, "the question of teacher professional development in the context of the TNE program cannot be posed simply in terms of the transfer of knowledge - although it is important to do so - but questions the construction of learning organizations where knowledge and practices are co-constructed .

Beyond the skills they lack, "many of the teachers we met expressed a certain disorientation, due to the lack of a general framework to guide their pedagogical choices regarding the use of available equipment and resources. The equipment and digital resources reach them (within the framework of the TNE demonstrator) without being part of an individual or school pedagogical project.

High expectations for equipment and connectivity

"Despite previous efforts to equip schools by the state and communities, the level of equipment prior to TNE is most often insufficient, both to meet the needs of emergency pedagogical continuity and to engage in the digital transition of education that schools need."
  • More than 40% of teachers report a lack of equipment and more than 30% underline that the equipment already installed is often obsolete. It is therefore essential to massively equip schools.
  • The lack of equipment and connectivity is partially compensated by a BYOD situation where teachers bring equipment to school. It should be noted that 8.62% of the teachers go as far as using a personal video-projection device at school.
  • On the other hand, teachers rarely request the use of students' personal equipment. Unlike in secondary and higher education, this is a marginal practice. 91% of them never do it and only 2% say they do it often or always.
  • In addition, the equipment of some families is insufficient to organize school work at home and the provision of TNE equipment for home school use raises many questions and difficulties (eligibility, ownership of equipment and insurance, loan modalities...)
  • Students' testimonies underline the precariousness of their access to family digital equipment and report that their use is often distracting.
"The equipment of students at home is however a major issue, especially in case of closure of classes and/or schools. It is one of the major proposals of the TNE device, and probably one of the most difficult to succeed because the identification of the families to be equipped is complex and raises ethical and legal questions".

"The equipment of teachers at home has also been reported for years as a major difficulty in the digital transition of teaching practices. More than two thirds of the teachers in the two departments declare that they are not sufficiently well equipped to work at home (65%). Among them, 29% were able to benefit from equipment made available to them by the school. This leaves about half of the teachers who are poorly equipped at home.

On the other hand, more than two-thirds of them say they are comfortable working at home (70%).

Rethinking resource policy based on usage

The evaluation confirms and underlines the singularity of the needs of elementary school in terms of digital educational resources. " The resources already available through national systems (...) are used by only 10% of teachers. In addition to the fact that these resources, despite their quality, are insufficiently known by teachers, they do not fully meet the requirements of elementary school.

The deployment of Digital Work Environments (DWEs), an important focus of state policy, particularly within the various versions of the educational continuity plan, is very uneven in the two departments of the demonstrator.

When an ENT exists, it is not necessarily used by all the teachers in the school and many families have difficulty connecting to it (inadequate equipment, insufficient connectivity, loss of logins and passwords, lack of skills).

Supporting parents and building a place for them in the school

This part of the TNE system was the most original and probably the most complex to deploy.
  • "The territorial networking work to identify the actors on the ground likely to act with parents is considerable. It is underway but will take time to be fully deployed with effectiveness.
  • "Everyone's expectations are very high on this part of the project.
  • Some of the teachers were concerned about a possible increase in their workload if they were given a new mission of steering or coordinating actions in favour of parents. "This observation underlines, if it were necessary, that the place of parents in the school remains an institutional blind spot and that we can expect much from the TNE program to remedy this.
The evaluation concludes with six recommendations:
  • "Give time to the actors in the field, develop a project culture;
  • Betting on bottom-up innovation;
  • Rethinking teacher professional development by articulating the provision of expertise and method with support for learning communities;
  • Revisit the theme of educational continuity;
  • Contribute to the development of a shared data culture;
  • Give scientific evaluation its place and build it upstream."
According to the Banque des Territoires, its total financing 200 million by the end of 2021: 27.3 million for the first two experiments launched in 2020 in Aisne and Val-d'Oise and 172 million for the ten new departments (Bouches-du-Rhône, Cher, South Corsica, Doubs, Finistère, Guadeloupe, Hérault, Isère, Vosges and Vienne), chosen, according to the Ministry of Education, " sothat the experimentation is the most representative of the diversity of the economic, geographical, sociological and technological realities of our territories in terms of digital accessibility."

Références :

Sources

Labo Société Numérique

Labo République Française Agence nationale de cohésion des territoires
What lessons can be learned from the "Digital Educational Territories" experiment for educational continuity?