1.
Open data in
Education What? Why? How? Where? When?
Marieke Guy
Marieke.guy@okfn.org
Edtalk, November 26th 2014

2.
Open Knowledge
Promoting open knowledge in a digital age
● A community-based, not-for-profit with projects and
partnerships throughout the world
● We build tools, apps and communities to create, use
and share open data and content - information that
everyone can use, share and build on
● We believe that by creating an open knowledge
commons and developing tools and communities
around this we can make a significant contribution to
improving governance, research and the economy
● Collaboration not control, empowerment not
exploitation, open not closed
https://okfn.org/

3.
WHAT IS OPEN DATA?

4.
By Mark Johnstone, Flowing data

5.
Open Data
What exactly is it?
“Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for
any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve
provenance and openness).”
“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared
by anyone for any purpose”
Taken from the Open definition http://opendefinition.org/

6.
http://data.gov.uk/
http://opendatahandbook.org/en/

7.
Types of Open Data
Data sets that are openly licensed
● Cultural: Data about cultural works and artefacts
● Science: Data that is produced as part of scientific research
● Finance: Data such as government accounts (expenditure and revenue)
and information on financial markets (stocks, shares, bonds etc).
● Statistics: Data produced by statistical offices such as the census and key
socioeconomic indicators.
● Weather and environment: Climate and natural environment
● Transport: Data such as timetables, routes, on-time statistics.

8.
http://www.police.uk/

9.
http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/

10.
http://govspark.org.uk/

11.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/

12.
WHAT IS OPEN DATA IN
EDUCATION?

13.
• Open data that
comes out of
education
institutions
• Open data that
can be exploited/
used by
education
institutions
• Open research
data
Open Education Data

14.
open data that can be used in
an educational way
Terms?
open data in education
Open education data
open educational data
open data from education

15.
WHAT DATA SETS ARE
WE TALKING ABOUT?

16.
Open Education Data
What data are we talking about?
● Student data: attendance, grades, skills, exams, homework
● Course data: employability related to courses, curriculum, syllabus,
VLE data, number of textbooks, skills, digital literacy…
● Institution data: location data, results, infrastructure, location,
student enrolment, textbook budget, teacher details…
● User-generated data: learning analytics, assessments, performance
data, job placements, laptop data, time on tasks, use of different
programmes/apps, web site data…
● Policy/Government data: equity, budgets, spending, UNESCO
literacy data, deprivation and marginalisation in education,
participation data…
http://bit.ly/oeh2-datasets

17.
http://www.slideshare.net/louiscrusoe/open-education-data

18.
‘Open’ Data Sets
Related to UK education
● Department for education data sets / Data.gov.uk / Ofsted
● Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
● Office for National Statistics
● education.data.gov.uk - snapshot of Edubase taken in 2009, linked data
● Higher Education Statistics agency - HESA
● Higher Education Information Database for Institutions - HEIDI
● University Key Information Sets (KIS)
● University linked open data – LinkedUp Catalogue bit.ly/linkedup-catalog
● Excellent list from Open Data Institute: http://bit.ly/1yturhj

19.
Paper provisory title: My Transparent School – A
comparative analysis of open government data in basic
education between Brazil and England
By Octavio Ritter
http://www.slideshare.net/otavios/open-education-data-research

20.
Open Data Analysis
• Macro (Education Policy)
• Census data, School performance indicators, Spending data
• Accountability model (high stake, low stake)
• Media (rankings, data journalism)
• Watchdogs (official and unofficial)
• Participation (NGOs, private companies, hackathons, etc)
• Meso (School Management)
• School performance indicators , administrative data (academic, management)
• Data Benchmark
• Collaboration vs Competition models (i.e. London challenge)
• Data support to local authorities
• Local open data groups (i.e. Manchester)
• Free data analysis tools to poor councils (Brazil)
• Micro (Student)
• Pupil personal data, academic history data, big learning data
• Conflict with private data (i.e. open government data vs data sharing)
• Personalized Learning
• Education Data Mining (EDM)
• Government as Plataform

21.
National Pupil Database
What is in it?
● Test and exam results
● Attainment data for students in non-maintained special schools, sixth-form
and further education colleges
● Information on pupils in independent schools, where available
● Gender, ethnicity, first language, eligibility for free school meals
● Special educational needs (SEN), pupil absence and exclusions
● Researchers and third-party organisations can apply for data extracts
from the national pupil database
● http://nationalpupildatabase.wikispaces.com
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-pupil-database

22.
HOW CAN WE USE OPEN
DATA SETS TO MEET
EDUCATIONAL NEEDS?

23.
Open Public Service Network
Empowering Parents, improving accountability
● Report published September 2013 by RSA
● Calls for release of data sets: Ofsted, free & private schools
data, teacher survey, parents views
● “Dangers of overemphasising the role of school choice as the
main driver of parental interest in information about their
children’s schools. It is equally important as contextual
information for parents and children wanting to understand
their own or their child’s educational progress” (Millar &
Wood)
http://bit.ly/opsn-accountability

24.
Using Open Data
...to meet educational needs
By supporting students
● New tools, enriching resources, exploration, informed choices
By supporting schools and institutions
● Learning analytics, improve efficiencies, benchmarking
By supporting governments and policy
● Change in policy, transparency, trust, education reform
● Value often in mashing together different datasets!

25.
UniversitiesUK & Deloitte
government’s open data
user group
http://www.slideshare.net/UniversitiesUK/open-data-potential-into-practice-
harvey-lewis-research-director-analytics-deloitte-london

26.
• School funding - corruption resulted in
gov money never reaching its
destination
• 1995 and 2001 funding reaching
schools rose from 24% to 82%.
• Programme of publishing data
• See Hubbard 2007 & Reinikke and
Svensson (2004)
http://www.cgdev.org/files/15050_file_Uganda.pdf

27.
● Won Making All Voices Count global innovation competition
● Mobile app that allows officials and citizens to monitor
attendance by teachers and students at school
● Data released openly
● The initiative has led to improved teacher attendance, which
in turn has led to improved pupil grades
http://tpilums.org/design/bahawalpur-service-delivery-unit/

28.
Schule.info
Case Studies
hoekiesikeenschool.nl
Burkina Faso
Equipment.data
RMSchoolfinder
http://bit.ly/oeh2-datacs

29.
Data Hacking Challenges
http://bit.ly/oeh2-datacomps

30.
Creating Open Data
And releasing it…
● See the open data handbook!!
● Keep it simple. Start out small, simple and fast.
● Remember this is about innovation.
● Engage early and engage often, consider ethics
● Remember the data is likey to reach info-mediaries
● Use open licenses
● Make the data available - in bulk and in a useful format
● Remember people will want to combine data sets, use local data &
open data – here lies the value!

31.
Universities & Open Data
Creating value from open data
● Universities UK seminar series: http://bit.ly/1xy4rzy
● Jisc funding – partners - Universities UK, ODI, NUS, Leadership
Foundation
● Universities signed up: Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge, Newcastle,
Aberdeen, OU, Southampton, Greenwich
● Possible work to develop a web based app, data set release
● Looking at staff recruitment, business processes, research management
and the REF, student experience (e.g use of labour market information)
● Data capability study – data skills curriculum

32.
Monetising Open Data
The figures….
● McKinsey - open data has a potential global value of $3tn
● Omidyar Network - open data – including open access research – could
contribute as much as $13tn to the economies of the G20 nations
cumulatively over the next five years.
● EU research - Open government data in EU would increase business
activity of €40bn - reduction in transaction costs, transparency, savings
etc.
● ???

33.
Monetising Open Data
How is it done?
● Transparency and improved efficiencies
● Business models: freemium (added value),
cross subsidy (more customers), network
effects
● Open Data 500 is the first comprehensive
study of U.S. companies that use open
government data to generate new business
and develop new products
● Open Data Institute – Make a business case
http://theodi.org/guides/how-make-business-case-open-data

34.
AND LEARNING
ANALYTICS?

35.
Learning Analytics
What is it?
● “The measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about
learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising
learning and the environments in which it occurs”
● Who is the collection for? What is the collection for?
● There have been conflicts between analytics for individual learners and
organisational stakeholders
● New area of Learning analytics for online courses such as MOOCs
● See http://www.laceproject.eu/ & http://solaresearch.org/

36.
Learning Analytics Data
Can be used to…
● Enable grade prediction and student success
● Improve student retention
● Measure student performance
● Determine what learners know and what they currently do not know
● Monitor learner engagement
● Personalize learning and ensure relevant content is delivered
● Reduce classroom administrative work
● More potential – it’s a tool…

37.
AND LEARNING?

38.
…and learning
http://einmaleins.tugraz.at/index/play

39.
Open Data Use in Education
Ideas for another day…
● So many data sets available including open research data
● Could be used by those in education online and in classrooms
● Use open data in as raw materials
● Will get people engaged in politics, interested in the world
● Need core data sets, linked with curriculum
● Data expeditions concept at School of Data: http://schoolofdata.org/
● Great examples in LinkedUp Challenge – used for teaching in politics,
agriculture, history, culture, ecology, medicine etc.
● LinkedUp Project: http://linkedup-challenge.org/

40.
http://www.histropedia.com/

41.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN
CHALLENGES?

42.
Challenges, Issues
And opportunities…
● Measuring, monitoring, protecting privacy and ownership
● Difficulties of improving learning without intruding on privacy
● What should be collected/released? How should it be assessed?
● Measurement and data leading to reductionist myth
● Will greater measurement lead to “better grades, test scores and
graduation rates”?
● Data literacy – correlation vs causation
● Stress of measurement
● The transparency trap
● Sustainability of applications

43.
Measuring and Monitoring
What? Where? When?
● The bus stop
● School office
● The classroom
● The cafeteria
● Nurse’s office
● The gym
● At home
● Online

44.
http://www.marketplace.org/tags/quantified-student

45.
Privacy
Quality, quantity and context
“At first approximation privacy seems to be related to secrecy, to
limiting the knowledge of others about ones self. This notion must be
refined. It is not true, for instance, that the less that is known about us
the more privacy we have. Privacy is not simply an absence of
information about [us] in the minds of others; rather it is the control
we have over information about ourselves.”
Charles Fried, Privacy, 77 Yale L.J (1968)

46.
http://bit.ly/ZBSLm7
http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N38/edprivacy.html

47.
Reductionist Myth
Does it apply to open education data?
● Idea that complex phenomenon can be broken down into conceptual
chunks small enough to be analysed or measured
● Will greater measurement lead to “better grades, test scores and
graduation rates”?
● Measurement is complex - correlation vs causation
● Data is rarely open to the public in any meaningful sense - “data divide”
● Need for data literacy (see School of Data: http://schoolofdata.org/)
● Need for data to be actionable – open data standards – conformant
licences

48.
Food for Thought
How do you feel about open education data?
● What data should be collected within education institutions or for
assessment?
● Do we need an open education data census?
● Government open data reflects actual public policy – what is available
is variable from country to country
● How do we evaluate this data? i.e. What makes a good student/citizen?
What makes a good school?
● Can open data open up the debate to a wider audience?
● Can open data lead to policy change and better education systems?
Worldwide?
● Remember – good questions lead to better answers!

49.
Shaping Change
With open education data…
Our opportunities for improvement are immense, and data provide a
powerful lens to understand how we are doing internally and
relative to our peers. This applies across all segments of what we do,
from teaching and learning to administrative support. Performance
metrics and dashboards are the beginning, but using data to
understand deeper correlations and causality so we can shape
change will be critical as we strive to advance our effectiveness.
David Lassner, Interim president and former chief information officer at the
University of Hawaii

50.
Conclusion
How can your institution use open data
● Open education data holds huge value and potential
● You need to consider the real value to you and your institution
● This value may relate to:
v Transparency
v Commercial value
v Social value
v Participation and engagement
v Making learning better
● Open knowledge is what open data becomes when it’s useful,
usable and used

51.
Open Education WG
People, projects and initiatives
● Brings together people and groups interested in open education
● Wants to initiate cross-sector, cross-domain, global activity that
encompasses the various facets of open education
● Active mailing list and Twitter feed, activities are co-ordinated through
bimonthly working group calls
● Includes open data in education, open educational content, open
learning and teaching practices and open accreditation
● Just released ePub, PDF and online version of Open Education
Handbook
http://education.okfn.org/

52.
Marieke Guy
Marieke.guy@okfn.org
Twitter @mariekeguy