With increasing global challenges, the Belt and Road initiative seems to offer one possible platform to think about different possibilities and pathways to promote international collaboration and development covering Asia, Europe, Africa, and other countries. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education, as a key focus, provides valuable perspectives for governments, inter-governmental and non-governmental agencies wanting to innovate and advance both ICT and education independently and collaboratively. This book highlights the burgeoning of ICT in education in eleven countries, with particular emphasis placed on the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. ICT has increasingly important roles in education including improve teaching and learning qualities, as well as equity in education. The prominent contributors describe the state-of-the-art of ICT in education in eleven countries based on six major themes (policy perspectives, infrastructure, educational resources, ICT integration into practices, students¿ ICT competence, and teachers¿ professional development). We hope the in-depth discussions included in this book would provoke more academic and policy insights globally.

Part one: Introduction.- Chapter 1: Introduction to B&R initiative.- Chapter 2: Methodology: Assessment framework of ICT in education.- Chapter 3: Overview of the state of development of ICT in education in B&R countries.- Part two: Country reports.- Chapter 4: Overview of the country reports.- Chapter 5: Singapore.- Chapter 6: China.- Chapter 7: Croatia.- Chapter 8: India.- Chapter 9: Korea.- Chapter 10: Malaysia.- Chapter 11: Russia.- Chapter 12: Bahrain.- Chapter 13: Egypt.- Chapter 14: New Zealand.- Chapter 15: Romania.- Chapter 16: South Africa.- Part three: Summary and conclusion.- Chapter 17: Implications.- Chapter 18: Recommendation.

Chee-Kit Looi is a Professor of Education at the National Institute of Education, and co-Director of the Centre of Research and Development in Learning, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. From 2004 to 2008, he was the Founding Head of the Learning Sciences Lab, Singapore, the first research center devoted to the study of the sciences of learning in the Asia-Pacific region. He has contributed to several meta-synthesis reports, including the 2016 Innovating Pedagogies Report, and the European Commission JRC Scientific and Policy Report on "Exploring conditions for sustainability, scalability and impact at system level ICT-enabled innovation for learning in Europe and Asia." He currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including IEEE Transactions in Learning Technologies, International Journal of AI in Education, International Journal of CSCL, and Journal of the Learning Sciences.

 

Hui Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher at the Smart Learning Institute, Beijing Normal University, China. Her research interests are in the field of learning and instruction, with a major focus on technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Her work chiefly focuses on integrating digital literacy education into the curriculum, and on students' digital literacy.

 

Yuan Gao is Director of the Open Educational Resources Lab and a Senior Researcher at the Smart Learning Institute, Beijing Normal University. Her main research interests include instructional design, teaching and learning in smart learning environments, educational technologies, educational psychology and foreign/second language learning and instruction. More recently, her work has focused on ICT in education, as well as open educational resources in Belt and Road Initiative countries - a topic on which she has contributed to several books and journal articles.

 

Longkai Wu is a Research Scientist and faculty member at the Office of Education Research, National Institute of Education, Singapore. His research addresses the development of sustainable frameworks to translate and scale education innovations into classroom practices in Singapore's school system. He has worked closely with local primary and secondary schools, as well as the Ministry of Education, to bring together research innovations, scaled practices and education policies. He is also an international committee member for the SysTech Value Network, a scaling initiative supported by Tekes, the Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, Finland.