Michelle: Cyberlite has a presence in 16 countries, mainly in Asia Pacific, and we have travelled to countries like Nepal and Bhutan. In all of these places children are all on the same apps, like TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat – but the difference is that they don’t necessarily have the same equitable access to quality education as a lot of our students are very privileged to have in Singapore. So our mission is to provide meaningful education and these learning touchpoints to children everywhere across the globe by working with different stakeholders across public and private sectors. 

Nina: One of the common denominators is the lack of education that we receive in cybersafety, and how predominant it is in the child’s life. An average child will get 46 minutes of education from a parent about cybersafety. We also know that anyone over the age of 13 spends 8 to 10 hours on their device online, and that is an independent learning or independent sitting experience for a child. I’m a parent of three – a parent will not watch them online [for 8 to 10 hours] – it’s the most tedious thing to do, right? The child may not have the knowledge or the know-how to actually work their way through their experience online. What we have found is that if a school does put in a robust programme, looking at how they can support them year on year [as opposed to a one-off workshop at the beginning of the year], we find that children can then bake in the knowledge and use it in their cyber experience more effectively. [In reality,] a lot of what the children know is relying on that one teacher in the school who champions the cause.

Michelle: One of the major challenges that we have seen is the knowledge gap between what adults think they know about a child’s cyberspace and what the child is actually experiencing. In some cases, yes, there are the one or two champion teachers in the school who are very devoted to understanding cybersafety. But in a lot of the schools that we go into, there is this understanding that online safety is something that they should teach and be concerned about, but no one truly has that domain knowledge or even any level of training to be able to handle cases when they come up amongst the children. 

Let’s take cyberbullying for example. We’ve gone to several schools so far now and whenever we go into a school, we talk to the teachers first to get an understanding of what the culture in the school is like, and we have heard time and time again that “we know it’s a thing out there, but it doesn’t happen in our school”. And then we do our workshops with the students, and when we ask how many of them have seen or experienced cyberbullying, a majority of hands go up. That just demonstrates very clearly the disparity between what the teachers think is happening and what is actually happening with the children. 

Keeping with the cyberbullying example, when cyberbullying does come up, teachers might tend to impose really harsh disciplinary action on the bully, like expelling them, suspending them or giving them detention. But that just makes the perpetrator bully their target in more covert ways. They will find new ways to do it. Say, instead of bullying on Instagram, now they might bully on Snapchat because Snapchat has disappearing messages, or they will do it through anonymous accounts. So the challenge we are trying to address is how we can also empower the teachers and adults in the room, including parents, to know exactly what is happening in the child’s world. 

Michelle: The Internet Independent Framework is something that Cyberlite developed and published, which outlines six core topics of cybersafety and three core topics of digital wellness that we feel every individual and every Internet user should know about.  We want people to become Internet Independent by empowering them with the necessary skills and knowledge to use the Internet confidently and safely so that they are not putting themselves at risk, not falling for scams, protecting their digital identity, and so on. 

We developed this framework to age up with a student – this is our key differentiator with all the other frameworks out there. If a child is introduced to our framework at age 7, it will continue to mature with that child as they approach 17, 18 years old. At age 7, we may be introducing them to usernames and avatars and how to stay anonymous online. At age 16, we are teaching them about digital permanency or digital footprints and how that affects their online reputation when they apply for a university or jobs. We really did our research in understanding what the child is exposed to at every age, and teach them accordingly.

Nina: [In terms of measuring the impact of our education efforts,] we have a few areas of measurement that we ensure that our schools can use. One is a cyber ambassador programme where children can win badges over the six topics that we have through courses, activities and interaction materials. If we want to do something more robust and come out with an assessment score, we have another product within the Internet Independent Framework where teachers can teach lesson plans on each topic, bring that into the classroom and use the rubrics of assessments. 

If we are working with a school, we are looking to help them make the whole programme robust. We will do a pre-scoping to understand where the school is [in terms of the state of their cybersafety education], and where their weaknesses and strengths lie. We will also do a post-wrap up scoping as well after we have implemented the framework into the school. We do not want to be really heavy-handed with it because a lot of schools are new to this and they want to start at a simple touch point and get the teachers and parents on board before carving out time to do this. There are also more mature schools that want something that they can report back. We have something for everyone.

Michelle: We have worked in 16 different countries and we are quite exposed to different learning environments and the different needs of children from developing to developed countries, public schools to private international schools. Interestingly, we have realised that a lot of the risks are the same across economic backgrounds and across geographies, because ultimately the Internet is very accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. 

Our framework has stood the test of being in all these different regions, because it all kind of comes back to that foundation of what you need to learn when you step into the Internet. Of course, amongst different regions, different issues are amplified in certain manners. For example, when we go to India, the issue of phishing is more pronounced in some schools, but that does not mean that they should not also learn about cyberbullying, digital identity, online relationships and so on.

Nina: We are very honest with our children, but we use a language that works at their level. What a teenager does not want is to be patronised, and a young child should not be overexposed. But we do have to give them the tools to make sure that they can recognise red flags when they may be in a potentially risky or dangerous situation. A lot of it will be led by using the right language at a young age and also engaging them in a conversation about what they have seen. 

With older children, thinking that they have not been exposed to [certain things] if they do not have the right settings or the right infrastructure already is naive. Sometimes it is just asking them to tell us the stories that they have seen, and then giving them the tools and critical thinking skills to think through: Where can I take control? Where have I lost control? Am I in a situation where motivations could be negative?

Michelle: The first step is to simply recognise cybersafety as a priority, and that this topic needs its own time and space to be discussed. A lot of countries outside of Singapore [in Asia Pacific] do not really have any sort of set time dedicated to teaching cyber safety in the classroom. A lot of the time we hear that it is being lumped together with ICT or computer science where they talk about passwords and privacy in a very light touch manner. We really believe that these cyber issues are affecting all our young children and teenagers in a way that is not being addressed in an open or even informative way on the whole. 

Our stance is always to be able to integrate cybersafety education into a curriculum. What schools can do is just provide that time and space for students to be able to learn it either through workshops or talks and invite guest speakers to come in and speak to the kids, but also having that safe space for them to be able to ask questions and to feel like this is something that adults care about; that if they do become friends with someone who is now asking them to meet in real life, or if they are in a cyberbullying situation, they know that their teacher ‘get it’ or their parents ‘get it’ and they can talk to them about it. When we go into these schools, kids often come up to us after the workshops and say ‘this is the first time that anyone’s talked to me about social media.’