Towards a German National Education Platform

Citizens are a country’s greatest resource. As today’s world is quite knowledge-driven, encouraging citizens to facilitate their competences becomes essential to the future and success of any country [1]. Manifestly, providing high-quality education is necessary and important. However, it is not as simple in practice to provide a high level of education quality. German education has been facing several major challenges such as shortage of educational staff, sluggish progress of digitalization as well as bureaucracy [2]. Additionally, if one strives to boost knowledge acquisition for all citizens of a given country, i.e. all social layers at any age, it would imply that life-long learning is required to be designed as convenient to use as possible [3]. The German government has acknowledged these issues and, in order to overcome those, invested vast resources into establishing a national education platform (German: Nationale Bildungsplattform or NBP). Since 2021 a project called BIRD, which stands for Bildungsraum Digital (English: Digital Education Space), is being developed in the form of a prototypical implementation for the future education platform. One of the work packages, has identified and conceptualized four possible application scenarios: classical learning environment, simulation games, extracurricular certifications and digitalization of administrative processes [4]. The prototypical implementation of the first one is described in this publication, while the others are outlined as an outlook on future work. The contribution, therefore, is to propagate the BIRD project and its contribution to the future of German education as well as to present the prototypical implementation of the first application scenario in detail along with establishing a profound foundation for future discussions that may inspire further scenarios.