TY  - CHAP
A1  - Mishra, Vidisha
A1  - Vladova, Gergana
ED  - Miller, Katharina
ED  - Wendt, Karen
T1  - It’s personal
BT  - 4IR and the future of learning
T2  - The fourth industrial revolution and its impact on ethics
N2  - The new technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) are disrupting traditional models of work and learning. While the impact of digitalization on education was already a point of serious deliberation, the COVID-19 pandemic has expedited ongoing transitions. With 90% of the world’s student population having been impacted by national lockdowns—online learning has gone from being a luxury to a necessity, in a context where around 3.6 billion people are offline. As the impacts of the 4IR unfold alongside the current crisis, it is not enough for future policy pathways to prioritize educational attainment in the traditional sense; it is essential to reimagine education itself as well as its delivery entirely. Future policy narratives will need to evaluate the very process of learning and identify the ways in which technology can help reduce existing disparities and enhance digital access, literacy and fluency in a scalable manner. In this context, this chapter analyses the status quo of online learning in India and Germany. Drawing on the experiences of these two economies with distinct trajectories of digitalization, the chapter explores how new technologies intersect with traditional education and local sociocultural conditions. Further, the limitations and opportunities presented by dominant ed-tech models is critically analyzed against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
KW  - 4IR
KW  - digital
KW  - online
KW  - gender
KW  - automation
KW  - inequality
Y1  - 2021
SN  - 978-3-030-57019-4
SN  - 978-3-030-57020-0
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57020-0_12
SP  - 151
EP  - 158
PB  - Springer
CY  - Cham
ER  -