Education International is the Global Union Federation that brings together organisations of teachers and other education employees from across the world. Through their 375 member organisations, we represent more than 33 million teachers and education support personnel in 180 countries and territories.
Our Director and Lead - Public EdTech Gurumurthy Kasinathan spoke at the Education International (EI) Asia Pacific Conference on Academic Freedom and Democracy on Digital Technology and Higher Education. He highlighted the growing threat to academic freedom and institutional autonomy posed by proprietary EdTech platforms that promote market-led models of education. Gurumurthy outlined three key steps for EI to address these challenges – including strong advocacy for regulation of EdTech platforms and demand policies that require technologies, especially AI, to be tested and piloted before large-scale adoption, with strict safeguards for data security and algorithmic openness; actively shape the EdTech discourse away from commercial and proprietary models toward a public EdTech paradigm, recognising that equitable and transformative education requires public digital infrastructure and drawing attention to the harms caused by market-driven EdTech, including impacts on learners and teachers; and promote the development of public EdTech that institutions can adopt, thereby reducing dependence on proprietary platforms.