Sovereign by Design: The 3CL Strategic Plan 2026–2028
Systems serve Institutions. Sovereignty serves People. That distinction sits at the centre of our new Strategic Plan.
For close to a decade, the 3CL Foundation has studied how technology reshapes education and the way people learn and work. The Plan we publish today, endorsed by our Board and covering the period 2026 to 2028, marks the point at which that experience converges with a new mandate. In April 2026, our updated statute was notarised via public deed. The Foundation is now formally repositioned from educational technology to the broader and more urgent territory of LearnTech: how individuals reason, judge, and exercise agency in a landscape where generative AI is embedded in everyday learning and work.
Why this Pivot. And why Now.
The vocabulary matters. EdTech has long focused on the systems and administrative frameworks that deliver education inside institutions. LearnTech starts from the learner. It asks what technology is doing to cognition, to social connection, and to the capacity to judge; and it treats the learner as the frame of reference, not the institution.
That change of frame is neither cosmetic nor academic. As GenAI becomes embedded in classrooms, workplaces, and public services, the operational question shifts. It is no longer whether an institution can deploy a tool; it is whether the citizen, worker, or student who encounters that tool can retain agency over their own learning, their own credentials, and their own reasoning.
Sovereign by Design
The Plan uses one phrase to describe the ambition: advancing sovereign LearnTech ecosystems through connected learning and critical literacies. Each of those terms is doing specific work.
Sovereignty, at the level of the individual, means the technical and legal capacity to own, control, and selectively share personal educational data through open standards such as W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralised Identifiers. At the level of the small state, it means the deliberate cultivation of modular resilience: public digital infrastructures, open procurement, and the capacity to participate in global technology ecosystems without becoming captive to any one platform actor. These two levels are related. A citizen cannot be sovereign inside a state that has ceded the terms of its own digital environment.
Connected learning is the pedagogical commitment. It bridges formal, informal, and non-formal environments, treats interest and community as legitimate drivers of learning, and refuses the assembly-line logic that shaped twentieth-century education. Critical literacies are the intellectual scaffolding: the capacity to interrogate the accuracy, transparency, and fairness of the automated systems that increasingly shape daily life, and to distinguish between using a tool and being used by it.
Malta’s structural position gives us an unusual vantage on all three. Dual membership of the European Union and the Commonwealth places us inside two regulatory and policy conversations at once. Small state agility, in the sense of shorter policy cycles and tighter institutional networks, gives us the capacity to test ideas at speed and re-pivot when the evidence demands it. We treat this as an operational advantage to be used, not a comfort to be defended.
What we will Do
The Plan is organised around four goals, four strategies, and three Programme Clusters spanning thirteen projects. In summary:
Cluster 1, Critical Literacies and Human Agency, is our production hub for the strategic primers, pilots, and campaigns that equip citizens, educators, and policymakers to navigate AI-mediated environments. Its centrepiece is a DigComp 3.0 pilot designed to measure whether people can reason and judge inside AI-mediated tasks, not merely whether they have used the tools.
Cluster 2, LearnTech and the Future of Work, examines how GenAI is reshaping the multigenerational workplace, the role of the Academy, and the skills required for meaningful participation in the labour market. Our flagship research programme with Malta’s National Skills Council anchors this cluster, alongside the launch in Q4 2026 of Insights, our Diamond Open Access Occasional Paper Series.
Cluster 3, Digital Sovereignty and Trustworthy Systems, is where our technical work sits. As a participant in the 34-organisation Eunomia.ai consortium and as a validator of decentralised identity frameworks, we will monitor the rollout of the European Digital Identity Wallet, incubate cross-border interoperability sandboxes, and advance interoperable microcredential standards on behalf of small states.
Across all three clusters, our identity is curatorial. We are not the instructor of record for the sector. We are the designer, evaluator, and knowledge broker who turns applied research into tools that others can adopt and adapt.
An Invitation
The Plan is a working document. It commits us to specific projects and to a distinctive institutional posture, but it is also an invitation to partners in the EU, the Commonwealth, and beyond who share the view that the coming three years will be defined by choices about agency, not just capability. If you work on any of these questions and would like to discuss collaboration, we would like to hear from you.
Read the full Strategic Plan here in your browser or use the download links below.
