At least since Corona and distance learning, most students can use a laptop, but that’s not all. They should learn how to behave online, what they are allowed to send and where they often give up their data without being noticed. Digitization is not just a hobby, the jobs of the future are also here. Furthermore, the young people should learn how to protect their devices and content from viruses or malicious software and how to recognize fake news.
For Vienna’s Director of Education Heinrich Himmer (SPÖ), basic digital education is an important new compulsory subject: “It is the school’s job to do what is needed today, and without digitization it simply does not work, and that is the message that the State gives, namely to say: Hey, we really have to deal with this together.” Previously offered as a mandatory exercise, digital education is now mandatory for the first three classes of middle school/AHS lower level. The fourth classes will only be included from 2023/24.
Spreadsheet and Fake News
Topics include the use of search engines on the Internet (1st class), the collection, filtering, sorting, interpretation and presentation of data (2nd class), the explanation of the term “social media” and understanding which ones interests of the respective offering company (also 2nd class) or the protection of devices and content against viruses or malicious software/malware (3rd class).
On the one hand, the students should learn how to use spreadsheet programs or how to change the code of a self-developed computer program so that it runs faster and more stably. On the other hand, it should also be conveyed under which conditions pictures or photos of other people may be sent or how fake news can be recognized.
Teachers had to go to school
Since May, those teachers who have already taught the mandatory exercise “Digital Basic Education” have been trained in what is known as a massive open online course. A university course for teachers who are already on duty will start in the autumn. From 2023/24 a separate teaching degree is planned. As a next step, the computer science curricula of the upper schools will be revised in order to adapt the content of the digital basic education to it.
Minister of Education Martin Polaschek (ÖVP) called the conversion into a compulsory subject in a broadcast a “historic moment in Austrian schools”. “Basic digital education in this subject means not simply operating a computer. Pupils should learn early on to move in the digital world, to design it and to process information from it.”