Bringing open data into danish schools and its potential impact on school pupils

Abstract

Private and public institutions are using open and public data to provide better services, which increases the impact of open data on daily life. With the advancement of technology, it becomes also important to equip our younger generation with the essential skills for future challenges. In order to bring up a generation equipped with 21st century skills, open data could facilitate educational processes at school level as an educational resource. Open data could acts as a key resource to enhance the understanding of data through critical thinking and ethical vision among the youth and school pupils. To bring open data into schools, it is important to know the teacher's perspective on open data literacy and its possible impact on pupils. As a research contribution, we answered these questions through a Danish public school teacher's survey where we interviewed 10 Danish public school teachers of grade 5-7th and analyzed their views about the impact of open data on pupils' learning development. After analyzing Copenhagen city's open data, we identified four open data educational themes that could facilitate different subjects, e.g. geography, mathematics, basic science and social science. The survey includes interviews, open discussions, questionnaires and an experiment with the grade 7th pupils, where

Open Data Visualization in Danish Schools: A case Study

“…This brief analysis will enable us to identify some of the relevant data categories which will be used as part of specific educational domains. The Open Data review of city enabled us to explore 4 impact domains (educational themes) discussed in [28] with associated sub-domains corresponding to main educational domains, i.e. Mathematics, Science and Geography.…”

Enterprise Architecture Oriented Requirements Engineering for the Design of a School Friendly Open Data Web Interface

“…We also surveyed ten Danish public schools to understand teacher and student perspectives in Open Data usage. This work is discussed in [8] and [30]. Teachers were very positive about the potential to facilitate teaching with actual data, but they required ready-to-use datasets and visualizations as part of teaching assignments.…”

“…To develop data skills, the authors suggested designing different activities for data collection as part of learning assignments. In another study, Saddiqa et al [30], identified Open Data domains that could easily facilitate basic school subjects, such as mathematics, science, social science, and geography, and presented example datasets to teachers in interviews and by setting up observations with a group of pupils attempting to make the use of the datasets. The authors highlighted different challenges in using Open Data at the school level.…”

“…In our study, to derive the enterprise architecture models, the requirements were identified through interviews with Danish public-school teachers, pilot tests, and observations with pupils, where the setup and participant details are given in [8] and [30]. Using EAORE, we explored and investigated the requirements of the Open Data interface for schools.…”

“…The main goal is to provide respective information of cities as part of teaching subjects. We have identified four educational Open Data themes corresponding to basic teaching subjects [30] in public schools: science, mathematics, social sciences, and geography. For instance, the web interface provides current information about pollution levels as part of the science subject.…”