Abstract:

Konnevesi and Viladecans are two very different procurement partners. The northern village of Konnevesi hosts 2800 inhabitants and the school centre has around 250 students. However, the level of technical equipment is quite high and modern for a school of this size, with big HD screens in every classroom and plenty of student laptop devices for everyday use. Viladecans is a 66.500 inhabitants city in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. Education is a priority for Viladecans, and even though municipalities in Spain do not have the competence on education, the city works hard to ensure the educational success of its students. In this respect, Viladecans has provided all city classrooms with interactive whiteboards and fiber optics and has developed numerous initiatives to foster educational innovation. Nevertheless, what projects such as IMAILE and LEA have shown is, that despite the differences, the needs of teachers and students are very similar.

IMAILE was a Pre-Commercial Procurement Project (PCP) in the education sector. Konnevesi and Viladecans were two of the four initial procurement partners, who challenged the market to develop innovative technology supporting the identified needs in European schools. The research and development in the project resulted in two pilots of smart and innovative Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), offering learning analytics provided by intelligent tutoring systems to primary and secondary schools. The results of the project show, that the PCP has provided pedagogical, financial and technological benefits.

The LEA project is making use of the public procurement and its potential purchase power. LEA aims at reforming traditional education systems to achieve better learning results for students. The steps in achieving this goal are conducting a needs analysis, preparing the first cross-border European PPI (Public Procurement of Innovation) and PCP, facilitating the dialogue between the demand and supply sides and raising awareness about the many benefits of innovation procurement. The LEA project is currently preparing a PPI on the increased demand of personalised learning. The future goal is to prepare a new PCP on innovative learning technology solutions based on the needs of European school in the spring of 2019.

In these projects, the role of Konnevesi and Viladecans as procurement partners, was and is to evaluate and report. The procurement partners play a key role in carrying out the needs analysis in their respective schools and observing the current status of education. The procurement partners list their hopes and needs for the project and test the personalized learning platforms together with the suppliers.

Konnevesi and Viladecans have both taken part in the IMAILE and LEA projects. However, they are two very different procurement partners from different procuring cultures. The differences could be seen in, for example, teacher participation and the know-how of educational technology. What IMAILE and LEA have shown, is how similar the educational needs are, despite the different baselines. The approach might be different, but the demands of teachers and students remain the same in both countries/schools.

The benefits of a being a procurement partner in an EU funded project for education development have been various. For example, the use of technology in education and highlighting one’s own assets, are amongst the many gains. In addition, the contacts in partnering project countries and in the field of digital learning platform suppliers can be utilized in various future occasions.

Keywords:

LEA, Imaile, procurement, digital learning, cooperation.