Digital Education Must Prove Who Learned

A learning platform reports that a student opened every unit, watched every video and submitted every assignment. The work is fluent, well structured and delivered on time. Yet the educator still cannot answer the decisive questions. Did this person engage the material? Which parts of the work are genuinely theirs? Can they explain the judgement they presented? Can they perform the capability without hidden assistance? Has the learning changed how they act among people?

Digital education has often treated access data as evidence of presence and a submitted artefact as evidence of competence. Generative and agentic artificial intelligence make that assumption less defensible. A system can now search, draft, revise and execute parts of a learning task while leaving behind activity that looks like purposeful human participation.

The answer is not to retreat from digital learning or to place every learner under continuous surveillance. It is to design a proportionate learning-assurance chain connecting identity, participation, authorship, independent performance, transfer, formation and the credential awarded.

The second East African Community Regional Conference on Education is underway in Nairobi from 25 to 28 August. Its official agenda connects foundational learning, teacher capacity, inclusion, future-ready skills, digitalisation, financing, governance and the East African Common Higher Education and Research Area under a stated movement from commitments to impact.

This is the newest consequential regional development for today’s question. The…