Experts urge Learners, Educators to prioritize Digital Wellness

Experts in the education technology field have called on parents, educators and learners to prioritize actions that would help to maintain digital wellness and build a resilient digital community.

This was the takeout at the just concluded June edition of Edtech Mondays, an initiative of the Co-Creation Hub (CCHUB) in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation’s Centre for Innovative Teaching & Learning in ICT. The engagement session themed “Digital Wellness and Resilience for Educators and Learners” was moderated by Chinyelu Akpa, Practice Lead, Education, CcHUB.

One of the panelists, Founder, Coachfrika, Afeez Iyiola whosecompany has been at the forefront in the balance between how digital tools are used and the wellness of teachers involved stated that priority must be given to understanding the educators, their readiness, availability, and self-motivation, provision of digital literacy to achieve wellness.

“When we bring digital innovations and solutions to the teachers, most of the time, we don’t do our background survey to understand who these teachers are. Digital literacy, proficiencies in the use of digital tools, self-motivation, customization that suits teachers’ individual needs, and developing the right structure are critical to delivering digital wellness,” Iyiola said.

Another panelist, Founder, Internet Safe Kids Africa, Confidence Osein explained that parents have a big role to play in ensuring that students maintain digital wellness in their daily online activities. According to Osein, parents and teachers should lead by example by allowing for a structured screen time for classroom and home settings. She advised that stakeholders must take advantage of technology by deploying digital wellness apps to monitor and regulate screen time for the students.

Also speaking, Product and Operations Lead, eLimu, Bridget Iyere stated that conscious effort must be made by edtech product developers or designers and parents to ensure that learners and educators have balanced and healthy interactionswith technology.

Stressing that edtech product designers such as eLimu should always take into consideration key factors such as size, age, parental consent, or control before designing an edtech product to guarantee the digital wellness of end users, Iyere maintained that there is a need to incorporate features into edtech products to guide against any negative influence on the kids. “For us, we design our content in byte sizes. So, when you are interacting with our content, whether it is the numeracy games, you don’t get a wholesome pack. It is broken down into levels with some contents locked. Besides, we also ensure that parents are in control with some of the product designs based on the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. In this situation, children under 13 years of age are not supposed to have email accounts without parental consent,” she said.

In her remarks, an award-winning teacher/educator, Atilade Oluwafunmilola emphasized the significance of balancing screen time for both educators and learners to ensure their digital wellness. She advised edtech product designers to incorporate strategic design principles that would help many learners to subconsciously disconnect from the use of digital devices in the course of learning.

Highlighting strategies deployed to ensure digital wellness while ensuring effective and efficient teaching and learning process, she stated that educators should adopt either the group method or the scaffolding approach as both help to set the expectation and deliver.