We, the members of the Global Book Alliance, welcome the establishment of a COVID-19 education coalition by UNESCO.
We believe this coalition has a unique opportunity to ensure continuity around children’s acquisition and practice of reading skills. We also want to help ensure that responses today help to build resilience and access to reading material in case of future crises.
As education systems everywhere are being disrupted at an unprecedented level, children will need to continue learning to read and reading to learn in their home settings.
The Global Book Alliance, through its flagship initiative the Global Digital Library (GDL), managed by the Government of Norway through Norad, can contribute by facilitating better and easier access to openly-licensed, free, high-quality reading resources, in languages children use and understand. Reading resources should be available, accessible, appropriate, free/affordable, and actively used at all times.
In response to the current pandemic, Norad and the GBA will redirect current resources to fast-track the creation of a seamless cross-platform search function that will allow users to access quality open educational resources for reading from multiple source sites.
By summer, 2020, the cross-platform search will cover resources in at least 150 languages. The number of languages is planned to expand to more than 250 in the longer term.
In accelerating this work, Norad and the GBA will emphasize and leverage equitable pathways for reaching all children, including those with disabilities, at scale with reading resources, including through distribution partnerships with mobile operators and technology companies and through books being audio recorded, subtitled with sign languages, or potentially read aloud on radio.
The mission of UNESCO's COVID-19 education coalition is important. The GBA looks forward to helping by supporting the goal that all learners have access to free and openly licensed high-quality reading material in languages they use and understand at this critical time.