SELFIE – Time to scale it up!
The European Training Foundation (ETF) has been supporting countries develop their digital and online learning (DOL) capabilities and policies throughout the years, and particularly throughout the COVID-19 crisis. As part of this cooperation, several countries have participated in piloting a program meant to highlight the real needs in this area.
The online self-reflection tool, SELFIE, was developed by the European Commission in partnership with the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the ETF, the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP) and UNESCO's Institute for Information Technologies in Education.
SELFIE aims to help schools reflect on their digital readiness, and any school can register for free to take the survey, involving students, teachers and school leaders. The data is gathered anonymously, and securely hosted by the European Commission.
International expert Michael Lightfoot is presently working on an in-depth study of six SELFIE cases, as part of an ETF-JRC project aiming to highlight the lessons learnt and point out possible conditions for the integration of SELFIE at system level. The study is looking at how national stakeholders have supported the use of SELFIE, how SELFIE has found entrance into the regional or national education and training systems, and, how this information can inform the scale-up in other education and training systems in the EU, ETF partner countries and beyond.
We talked to Michael for OpenSpace – on Zoom, where else – about the methodology, but also the very purpose of SELFIE and the potential it holds.
He emerged from the contre-jour light, enthusiastic to talk about SELFIE and getting straight at the heart of the matter from the very first question.
OpenSpace: If you were to explain in one sentence why any school should go through the SELFIE process, what would you say to them?
Michael Lightfoot: SELFIE is a vehicle for school self-empowerment, a vehicle through which you can realise new learning – facilitated through technology – but not driven by technology.
OS: Why is this distinction important?
ML: Because it’s not about technology for technology’s sake and shiny new things. The focus is on learning. SELFIE is about digitally enabled learning, and everything that goes with that – including an ethical behaviour online.
OS: As part of the study you’re currently working on, you’ve run a series of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in the implementation of SELFIE in the selected countries. The data you collected is meant to focus on their real experiences with SELFIE and concrete strategies at system level. Have you been surprised by any of the answers?
ML: One of the most positive findings is the extent to which, on the whole, the teacher workforce are very enthusiastic and welcoming of SELFIE. Rather than being cynical and wondering “what is the point, because nothing will change”.
OS: So what is everyone getting enthusiastic about?
ML: School autonomy, accountability, local empowerment, student-centred learning.
This has immediate utility to the schools, but from a policy perspective it’s actually moving the thinking in a particular direction – which is that these professional practices are the best way to promote lifelong learning.
OS: And why might teachers lose motivation and start to be cynical about participating in SELFIE?
ML: Like with any review cycle, SELFIE identifies the problems, the problems lead up to an action plan, the action plan leads to some sort of process, the process should bring about change. The first bits are easy. It’s enacting that change which is the problem, because there are lots of financial barriers, resistance, and even personal barriers.
If the SELFIE process is going to be worth anything, it has to be invested with the support mechanisms that come afterwards. You do the analysis and then what? You need to have the resources to complete the loop. SELFIE will retain its relevance at school level only so long as the results are actionable, and something happens. And this is a question of school leadership, policy, but also management of expectations.
Otherwise, the developmental feature of SELFIE becomes diluted. And that’s what breeds teacher cynicism. There have been any number of initiatives like this which start off with a great idea, but don’t follow through.
OS: This brings us to something that you consider to be an important part of education development – the public-private partnership (PPP).
ML: Yes, I think it is only through that kind of enlightened PPP that we can hope to get universal access, universal connectivity and one-to-one ownership of devices. You can only go so far in digital education without one-to-one ownership.
Very quickly into the SELFIE consolidation we’ll need to start exploring and unpacking this wider agenda, in order to be sustainable and avoid a widening of the digital divide.
Both the devices and hardware industry and telecoms are massively profitable industries, which at most levels benefit hugely from having an IT-literate workforce and their contribution to the education sector specifically is not (yet) earmarked.
OS: Let’s go back to the study you’re working on for a minute.
ML: Yes. It’s a policy research and development study – looking at the evidence [gathered as part of the study] with a view to policy making.
OS: What kinds of challenges have you come across so far?
ML: One of the greatest limitations of our study and of the SELFIE process itself is precisely the self-reporting nature of this research. “How did you feel about this”, “what do you think your skills are”, “what do you think about this policy” – it’s that kind of opinion-driven analysis. Which does have legitimacy, but in terms of objective analysis it is somewhat limited. And I think it would be quite dangerous to build a national superstructure of benchmarking based on just this type of evidence. But by engaging the teaching workforce and the student voice as well, which is often not heard in these exercises, SELFIE has become a very inclusive process, and one which is very clearly about local empowerment, local understanding of the tools, local recognition of what should and shouldn’t happen.
Secondly, the European Commission has been very careful about maintaining data integrity and has been absolutely rigorous about the schools’ ownership of the SELFIE data. It may be aggregated, nationally, on an anonymous basis, but it’s up to the schools to share it. That can be a frustration to many central administrations. However, I did spend the early part of my career doing a lot of school inspection and quality assurance (QA), and I know that schools can be quite guarded in the responses they give. So the fact that the data resulting from SELFIE is not by default accessible for aggregation is also SELFIE’s strength – and the guarantee for honest answers from the schools. If you think of SELFIE as a QA and audit process, where there are national benchmarks and there’s a level to which you’re expected to rise or fall below, there will always be winners and losers. It becomes much harder to encourage people to be honest in their responses.
OS: So far, the SELFIE survey has been taken by over 7000 EU and non-EU schools, as part of pilot or scale-up stages. What are the possible scale-up pathways in your view?
ML: One possibility is if you see SELFIE as a useful audit tool, and therefore you make participation mandatory. There would be automatic aggregation of data, even anonymized. You would then get a national picture, a regional picture and a local picture of the schools that are further up or down on a digital education scale. You could say “this simply gives an accurate reflection, we’re not pointing any fingers, but you know who you are, the ones that are succeeding and the ones that are failing”. It wouldn’t take more than one or two cycles of this before you re-inforce a winners and losers mentality.
The other pathway is the one we are advocating – which is to follow a democratic participatory approach, to use this model and demonstrate, through workshops, national consultations, etc., how to go about the process and what the outcomes are. And thus turn competition into conversation.
My hope is that schools themselves will acquire a digital maturity that allows them to carry on with a selfie-like process. And then the accountability piece is handled separately through a national QA agency.
The two can co-exist.
We look at schools as models for success, and SELFIE is a tool going in that direction. It’s all about reflecting on the nature of the learning process, policy making at school level and leadership. That’s every aspect of a school’s operations, with a digital catalyst.
OS: What does the future look like for SELFIE?
ML: Looking into the future, we need to have a system where the expectations that are raised by the SELFIE process have some way of realisation, through action planning which is supported and funded. I see at least two inevitable directions of development. The first one is to do with resources, infrastructure, device ownership, connectivity: there is massive variance and you really only make big strides when you have one-to-one ownership of devices. The second is to do with continuous professional development (CPD). I’ve been involved with teacher CPD and digital learning for 20 years, and the issues are the same. The only difference is we now have a bigger critical mass which is, perhaps surprisingly, not age related.
What COVID-19 has accelerated is the fact that there is no longer a strong argument for non-digital learning. There was still a camp that used to say “we don’t need digital, we can get very good results without it”. But this is probably not going to be the last school closure, and we need to have that flexibility. Those arguments are now completely out of the window – we just need to look at intelligent deployment, and realistic and practical means to avoid exacerbating the digital divide. A realistic plan based on the resources available.
Preliminary findings of the study Michael Lightfoot is working on will be presented in a webinar to be organised by the ETF and the JRC by the end of 2020, and in a joint publication highlighting possible pathways for SELFIE to be scaled up to system level.
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