It is proven that children can read more efficiently if they are taught in their mother tongue, which enables them to build on existing knowledge.

Currently most of the digital learning curriculum available is in English, while only 5% of the world population are native English speakers. How can we  bridge the Digital Language Gap, and ensure that young children have access to interactive, engaging and fun learning tools in their language.

By protecting languages, which are the cornerstone of our identity, we participate to the world cultural sustainability. Should we leave out 95% of the world population?

Thank you very much for bringing this important topic to our attention. Your comments sent me on a Web search for non-English-language digital education resources, especially OER for e-learning, and my lack of search success immediately confirmed the presence of a Digital Language Gap. The only relevant search hit? Wikipedia, which according to WikiEducator has thousands of articles in multiple languages, including Dutch, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish (versus, notably, 1.5 million in English).

Isabelle, thanks for initiating this conversation — an important one. The digital divide in education is not just about basic access to technology, but also access to content that is linguistically and culturally relevant. We’re going to focus on Open Education Resources in March on GETideas.org, and OER in terms of open-ness and repurposing of content needs to include a cultural/language component. The MIT OpenCourseWare project has partnered with organizations to translate the content into several languages.  

Yong Zhao, with the College of Education at the Unversity of Oregon, expresses a concern over what he sees as one impact of the global competitiveness in education test scores – possible global homogenization. He advocates for diversification and valuing the strengths of local culture. He shares his thoughts in this brief Conversation on Global Education video.