Digital Education, Competences, and Rights

At the end of 2003, while I was a PhD student at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy, given my IT&C skills, I was asked to develop the online presence and electronic versions of the curriculum for the Distance-learning section of a MA program in „European Studies and EU Law”. Besides that, the coordinator of the MA program had also put me in charge of the marketing campaign. Two years later, and combined with the efforts of late Professor Mihail-Constantin Eremia from the Faculty of Law, the distance-learning section of the MA program went from little over 20 students to almost 100 students. During the same period, I taught a class in Computer Skills for Philosophy students at the same institution.

Between 2009-2011, I was involved in a national project called „Knowledge-based Economy – EBC”, which was developed by the Romanian Ministry of Communication and Information Society and implemented with the help of a local Tech company (Siveco). The entire budget of the project was 69.4 mil USD, with USD 60 mil USD representing a loan from the World Bank. 255 communities were selected for this project and benefited both in terms of IT&C infrastructure and technical assistance. During this time, I was an external consultant working on the integration of digital technologies in local schools and businesses. Part of my job was to develop a curriculum on this subject and train teachers, civil servants and young business people to maximize the use of new technologies in their daily activities.

In November 2021, I was asked by the Romanian Ministry of Education to coordinate one of the 8 working groups that drafted the national Strategy concerning the Digitalization of Romanian Education, 2021-2027 (SMART-Edu). My working group was dedicated to „Lifelong Digital Learning” and presented a series of public policy proposals that made it in the final draft of the Strategy. Unfortunately, the new government and the new minister of Education did not assume the document due to differences of political agenda. Even if some proposals were included two years later in some other official documents and the SMART-Edu Strategy was used by the Ministry of Education as part of the bibliography for several job openings, the strategy was left in the draft version.

During the last two decades, I have written and prepared several training materials on digitalization of schools and educational activities for students and teachers, authored an extensive study on the integration of EduTech/EdTech in Romanian schools and several public policy proposals in this field. I am active promoter of Digital Education, Digital Competences, and Digital Rights, and I fully support the EU Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027. I strongly believe we need to take a stand against all those that block the advancement of Romanian educational system either out of stupidity or incompetency or immoral and illegal interests.

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