Ready for eLearning? A global comparison

As we have all seen in recent months, the Coronavirus pandemic has put a strain on education systems globally, eliminating "classic" classroom training for months and instead giving a strong boost to eLearning training that has become - in fact - the only and most effective way for school education.

In this sudden and massive transfer of activities from the classroom to the online, significant problems of a personal nature (such as the lack of computers or computer tools at home) and of a technical nature (such as the quality of the network infrastructure and the ability to transport data) have emerged.

Starting from the consideration that the quality of digital teaching and e-learning is always linked to the level of digital infrastructure in the country from which it is accessed, Preply - an international platform dedicated to digital learning, more specifically dedicated to providing teachers and tutors of foreign languages - presented a research carried out in recent months aimed at defining an e-Learning index to understand which countries at global level offer the best conditions for the development of effective e-learning platforms.

Says Kirill Bigai, CEO of Preply "We are convinced that e-learning has great potential to improve educational opportunities on a global level. The Coronavirus pandemic has revealed that digital teaching opportunities are still poorly distributed. But there are good opportunities to start investing in the digital infrastructure needed for the conversion to online learning. This is the purpose of the study: to find out to what extent students have access to those tools and digital resources that are adequate for the purpose".  

Preply research has considered some basic conditions for e-learning and digital education in 30 countries globally, divided into three scenarios:

Access to online education

Computer access from home, i.e. the percentage of the total population with private access to a computer

Distance learning courses, i.e. the variety of study programs and courses that can be conducted and completed entirely online, measured quantitatively

Expenditure on education, i.e. the share of gross domestic product per capita that the state spends on higher education

Internet availability

Broadband Internet speed, i.e. the average speed of broadband downloads, in Mbps

Mobile Internet speed, i.e. the average download speed with mobile data, in Mbps

Costs, i.e. the average monthly costs for broadband internet access, in euros

Scenario of e-Learning

Tutor Hourly Remuneration, i.e. the average hourly remuneration of a tutor, in Euros

Market Growth, i.e. a standardized data comparison from 0 to 100, based on Preply's internal data

Market Volume, i.e. the total number of students enrolled, pupils in primary and secondary education, as well as pre-school children, quantitative.

The evaluation of these conditions generated values that were aggregated and averaged into a final score for each individual state expressing the conditions for online learning.

Norway wins with 100 points, followed from second to tenth place by Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, New Zealand, Finland and Australia closes with 67.7 points.

And Italy? Italy is in bad shape, it is in twenty-second place in the ranking, slowed down by the lack of internet infrastructure, poor offer of distance learning courses and low access to computers, with the sad final score of 41. We go quite badly in Access to online education, very bad for internet availability, so-so for the eLearning scenario.

See the complete ranking on this page.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator