Latin America is facing an education crisis. More children and young adults are attending school, but an alarming number of them drop out early or graduate with low learning levels. This crisis is largely due to the lack of innovation in schools, as teachers continue to use ineffective pedagogical methods and outdated teaching tools.

Public education systems must explore how to tap into the transformative power of technology to significantly and sustainably change how children learn and how education systems operate. Latin America is desperately lacking a vision for educational innovation, one that takes advantage of the region’s increased connectivity and access to the internet, as well as new technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data and virtual reality.

The Inter-American Dialogue has established a Working Group on Innovation and Technology in Education with the purpose of generating that vision and promoting it at a regional level.

The mission of the Working Group is to contribute to creating an ecosystem for educational innovation in which actors from the public and private sectors collaborate effectively to generate and scale up new innovations in education.

The Working Group’s specific objectives are:

1. Generate ideas on how Latin American countries can utilize technologies to revamp teaching methods and improve educational management
2. Facilitate knowledge-sharing among different countries and actors in the region
3. Improve policies pertaining to educational innovation through strategic interactions with key actors in the region’s public education systems
4. Promote collaboration among private-sector stakeholders, researchers, public-sector specialists, international cooperation agencies and others on matters of educational innovation