Abstract

This article describes a digital educational system and its impacts in various countries. For a nation to enhance its education system, ideas, strategies, and models from outside the country are important. Also, as countries become more diverse through other ethnic groups immigrating, an educational system may become less effective unless adaptations are made. However, because education is a means of ideological transmission and socialization into a country’s beliefs and values, typically nations are wary of outsiders seeking to serve their students. The Digital School (Tds) is a nonprofit initiative in its fourth year, sponsored by Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives from the United Arab Emirates (Uae). Tds is developing, implementing, and refining a model for digital education for marginalised communities around the world. Tds partners with countries attempting to enrich their national education curriculum for currently underserved marginalised students and to enable those students to learn digital skills. Frameworks from the scholarly literature are discussed to illustrate the challenges of an external group offering to enrich a country’s education system. The Tds model is articulated: vision, mission, and values; a digital ecosystem for learning; educators’ professional development; partnerships already attained with a variety of countries; and strategic outreach. The article then discusses findings from evaluative interviews of stakeholders about Tds operations in four countries. Evidence supports two hypotheses: 1) Tds is seen as an agent for delivering each country’s national curriculum to underserved and marginalized groups with fidelity, as well as for equipping students with digital skills that prepare them for future life and work, and 2) Tds’ adoption policies and implementation practices are based on Trust, Coordination, Co-learning, and Co-invention, consistent with the research literature on this topic.