Chile's Digital Learning Strategy During the COVID-19 Pandemic Connecting Policy with Social Realities?

Abstract

The change from in-person to in-home schooling and the rapid digitalization of the system impacted the access to education and the quality of the outcomes during the pandemic, but the extent to which digital measures helped school administrators to face that impact is difficult to understand without hearing from them directly. To give those who had to adapt to digital learning some voice, this report discusses the experiences of one national education policy expert, one Learning Resources Coordinator in a public school in Northern Chile, and one Technology Coordinator in an elite private school in Santiago during the process of adapting to digital learning. The goal of these semi-structured interviews was to explore the different digital learning strategies among systems and regions at the school-home level, to then compare them with the national vision and the information that official documents and Aprendo en línea provide. The interviews took place from November, 2020, to February, 2021, right between the end of Chile’s 2020 school year and the beginning of the 2021 one.

The findings of the exploration indicate that school administrations, but also the type and position of schools within the education system, determined which digital strategy schools adopted and how successful it was. They further revealed the social disparities that prevailed by the lack of digital tools, but also new socio-educational challenges. In all, current Chilean officers stood out as the ones accountable for addressing the digital divide, which in this case can be understood as those who learned how to use digital tools (US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), 1999), and those who are learning to create them.