Background and rationale

Online education has a strong potential to enhance inclusive excellence, because of flexibility, access, diversification, and participation. However, this has not yet been systematically inventoried, implemented nor validated. In most cases, the transition to online education has primarily consisted of a mere shifting of existing educational concepts, working methods, and assessments of analog education to the digital context.

The question of what inclusion means in the context of online education, and how to best establish this in online or hybrid, is yet unclear. And since inclusion often is not even a primary focus of analog education, it is consequently also not written into the core of digitized education.

The educational changes necessitated by the COVID pandemic create a window of opportunity in which we should seize the moment to rethink education and to evolve towards an excellent education that is at its core inclusive.