Abstract:

The idea of openness in education is now strongly affected by increasing amounts of data available and the growing demand for sharing information and engagement among stakeholders. Although it is assumed that opening up large amounts of educational data enables involved stakeholders to make better informed decisions, there is still a research gap in the understanding of stakeholders’ capabilities, skills, and attitudes in reusing of these data.

Since the relation between required skills, capabilities, and attitudes and a way how to acquire and develop them is closer in the educational sector than other sectors, this paper explores various opportunities, approaches, and challenges of Big and Open Linked Educational Data (BOLED) analytics that can provide a positive impact in the educational process. For this purpose, a research methodology that utilizes the Delphi method to derive a consensus from a panel of experts was developed. A framework reflecting the extent to which BOLED analytics affects stakeholders’ capabilities, skills, and attitudes is established and evaluated against needs of different groups of stakeholders, namely basic, intermediate, and advanced jobs. In contrast to previous research, this paper provides a comprehensive view of each aspect related to big/open/linked educational data as well as the lifecycle phases and activities required to perform data analytics on these data. In addition, a set of required skills, capabilities, and attitudes is provided and described in relation to the challenges faced by the educational system.

The results provided by the Delphi method showed that regarding to utilization of BOLED analytics, it is required to have hard skills to perform these tasks, next to domain and educational knowledge. The experts mentioned data and information literacy as the most important ones and argued that it should be a critical part of any education level. It is also crucial to have a good understanding of the problem and topic to be able to answer the right questions. On the other hand, it was confirmed that not all the BOLED lifecycle phases need to be performed by one stakeholder and it is possible and recommended to involve more stakeholders to work together. In this regard, soft skills related to communication, collaboration, and cooperation are important to overcome the missing hard skills of some stakeholders. The phase that requires soft skills the most is data publication, sharing, and reuse since stakeholders of all roles should participate here and bring together their skills to create a value. The most important activity is being able to view and explore datasets visually. However, visual information is not always accessible through data analytics tools or open data portals and the potential to engage more stakeholders is not fully used. Hence, on the one hand, it is necessary to increase emphasis on data visualization techniques in the educational process and, on the other hand, tools developers and data providers should introduce more features to enable applying these skills in practice.

Together these results provide important insights into the required level of capabilities, skills, and attitudes needed by different stakeholders to deal with BOLED analytics. These can support educational institutions in establishing strategies for the development of the right skills needed to gain the value from these data.

Keywords:

Big and open linked data, education, skills, Delphi method, framework.