What does the Quebec budget contain concerning education and technologies?

L’École branchée has leafed through the Quebec budget tabled yesterday by the Minister of Finance, Éric Girard, for you. Here’s what we spotted that mostly concerns education and digital.

“Technopedagogy has really become an additional tool in the success of young people. “

The education section begins as follows:

“The school environment has experienced great upheaval due to the closure of schools and distance education. It is therefore essential to offer students, staff and the network conditions conducive to remedial education and academic success ”.

Thus, within the framework of this budget, the government plans in particular:

• an amount of $ 170 million over two years to support students and school personnel with a view to consolidating learning and improving support in the context of the health crisis;
• an amount of $ 403.5 million by 2025-2026 to improve support for the school network so that each young person can benefit from the best possible development and learning conditions.

It is possible to imagine that part of this money could be invested in digital resources.

Artificial intelligence in education

One section particularly caught our attention. We reproduce it as is.

Pursue the digital shift through artificial intelligence

“The deployment of the digital shift in education must continue at a sustained pace. As such, artificial intelligence offers promising prospects for the benefit of school perseverance, in particular through predictive analysis of the risks of school failure.

The government intends to support artificial intelligence experimentation projects in an educational context, allowing the development of tools aimed at maximizing the effectiveness of interventions with students and promoting the success of as many people as possible.

As part of the 2021-2022 budget, the government is planning investments of $ 10.6 million over two years to continue the digital shift through artificial intelligence. “

Our team will try to find out more about this measure in the coming weeks.

Higher Education

Although École branchée does not generally cover the higher education sector, we consider it appropriate to mention that the budget foresees “investments of 85 million dollars by 2025-2026 in order to deploy more digital solutions in institutions of higher education “.

In addition, “in order to encourage college students to undertake and persevere in fields of study leading to jobs in information technology (IT), the government will offer perseverance support scholarships to college students, which could reach $ 2,850 ”. Perhaps this could help you convince some tech-savvy students to continue their college education.

The government also wants to promote the graduation of IT students. “Support will be given to colleges and universities so that they can develop pathways for students whose prerequisites are missing, offer part-time training options, get closer to secondary education, approach businesses for increase internships, promote work-study alternation and increase interregional mobility ”. This is a great openness to offering different educational paths that will suit a variety of students.

The entire 2021-2022 budget plan is available online.

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