The Assocation has submitted evidence to the Commons Select Committee of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills for the digital economy inquiry.
Scope of the inquiry
This inquiry focuses on Government actions affecting businesses in the digital economy; how to maximise the opportunities and overcome challenges in the sector; and how the sector can contribute to improving national productivity. It considers how businesses can best adapt to the rapidly changing environment and utilise digital infrastructure to improve their performance, and what the Government can do to ensure that the UK can play a leading role in taking advantage of digital technologies.
For full information visit the inquiry webpage.
You can now access ALT's response in full here and read the Executive Summary below:
Executive summary
- ALT is making this submission as a membership body, representing as members over 1750 individuals and 180 organisations, including universities, colleges, Government departments, agencies, and software, hardware, and e-learning businesses from across the UK;
- We identify a technology skills gap across the workforce and provide evidence about how the education and training sector can contribute to upskilling the current and future workforce;
- We recognise the crucial role teachers and trainers have and the urgent need to provide more consistent support for their professional development as well as recognition in particular in regard to Learning Technology and the role professional bodies can play in delivering this;
- We consider how tech start-ups can engage more effectively with their target markets in particular in the education sector;
- We highlight the importance of policy frameworks to provide effective guidance in relation to intellectual property and copyright in a context where disruption through increasingly open models is increasing;
- Based on the evidence available to us from across our membership, we include four key recommendations for the Digital Economy relating to recognition of the broad contribution of learning technology and its intelligent use, a coherent, cross-programme and cross-department approach to the encouragement and deployment of Learning Technology to assist in development planning and capacity building and requiring teacher training and development schemes to have appropriate provision for Learning Technology.
You can view other ALT's consultation responses here.