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This paper contributes to understanding opportunities to use social media to identify the priorities and challenges of students from different countries in digital and face-to-face learning and networking during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the new reality after this crisis. The COVID-19 crisis resulted in intensive new e-learning and hybrid learning applications in higher education. When there is a shift from a teacher-controlled class environment to a more learner-controlled social media, the role of the educator becomes more of a facilitator. The purpose of the research is to reveal learning preferences and networking challenges that students do not usually share in a class environment. This paper contributes to developing social media activities facilitated by instructors and combined with international learner-driven knowledge sharing in global crisis situations. To study the challenges of COVID-19 for students in online learning and physical interaction, netnography approach combined with educators' interventions to study students' preferences in the Facebook group Challenges in Online Learning -- COVID-19 was applied. Research outcomes reveal that the most popular Facebook polls for students were questions about group work and exam arrangements during the pandemic and work from anywhere future prospects, cross-border mobility regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic and reasons why some students do not participate in web conferences using their computer cameras. Students shared the view that flexible online work from anywhere solutions will be, for many organisations, one of the trends that will remain after the COVID-19 crisis. The Facebook group enabled international knowledge sharing, where students and educators could share their views on many issues that will also influence the rapidly changing online learning and networking environment after the COVID-19 crisis. Applying social media in international knowledge sharing involving instructors and students from different countries can contribute to learning about the diversity of views in crisis situations and enhance international entrepreneurial collaboration.

This paper presents a qualitative study of Estonian video game companies. In total, 11 companies were interviewed regarding their company values and expectations for employees. The interviews consisted of two parts. First, a regular semi-structured interview was conducted. In the second part, we used three persona sheets based on Bachelor graduates to provide an imaginary but tangible hiring situation for the company. This allowed us to explore in more detail what the companies consider important in certain employee candidates. Findings show that a strong common theme is that people working on video games need to be aware of the player and how the work shapes the game experience. Many companies encourage a work ethic based on individual responsibility and ownership in their employees. Interdisciplinary communication is very valued as well. Several companies said that employees need to be good fits, and a few even said that employees need to feel like part of a family. One company implied that, unfortunately, employees should be ready for crunch time. Overall, this paper depicts the peculiarities of different Estonian video game companies. While some of these might be specific to Estonia, we believe companies elsewhere also exhibit such properties. Thus, this observation paper provides insight into the video game sector for video game curriculum designers, video game scholars, and the video game industry itself.

Mathematics seems abstract, difficult, and uninteresting to many students, which in turn reduces their interest in learning mathematics. It has been found that the use of ICT and meaningful contexts of problem-solving tasks can make learning mathematics more enjoyable and easier to understand for students. To increase students' interest in learning mathematics and using the GeoGebra program, math competitions "Notice Mathematics Around You" have been organized in Estonia for lower and upper secondary school students, where the task was to create a GeoGebra applet on a given topic. In our paper, we present the works of students from three years on topics such as creating patterns using graphs of functions, creating fireworks for Estonia's birthday and creating moving objects. The number of participants in these competitions was 232, 160 and 167, respectively. We also present students' opinions on this competition based on the questionnaires they filled out. The results showed that participants learned more about the GeoGebra program by creating their works. Some students realized that their math skills improved while doing the competition work or they understood something that they could not grasp in class with paper and pencil. Students realized that mathematics is useful beyond the classroom, and therefore, their attitude towards math improved. They enjoyed the sense of accomplishment, seeing the beauty of mathematics, and having math classes different from the usual. Students' opinions could encourage teachers to give students similar tasks in math classes or in projects that integrate multiple subjects. This could also provide ideas for students' creative work.

The success with which minority teachers cope with socio-cultural integration indicates their transformative agency. However, teachers' ideational projects, which are converted into a set of established practices, are tightly connected with their ideologies. In this case what they transform is not a matter of integration for them but is irrevocably intertwined with protecting their own culture. Applying a symbolic interactionist methodological lens and Archer's 'social morphogenesis' explanatory framework, in this qualitative research I aim to examine the unique educational context of Estonia. Schools with Russian as the language of instruction co-exist with schools where instruction is in the national language. The paper explores the mechanisms that stand behind the social agency of minority teachers and why their practices are considered 'morphostatic' for the whole education system. The paper concludes that these teachers' agency is culturally mediated and their strategies are reflexive and morphogenetic in nature, even though they don't lead to integration.

This paper discusses contemporary societal roles of German in the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania). Speaker and learner statistics and a summary of sociolinguistic research (Linguistic Landscapes, language learning motivation, language policies, international roles of languages) suggest that German has by far fewer speakers and functions than the national languages, English, and Russian, and it is not a dominant language in the contemporary Baltics anymore. However, German is ahead of 'any other language' in terms of users and societal roles as a frequent language in education, of economic relations, as a historical lingua franca, and a language of traditional and new minorities. Highly diverse groups of users and language policy actors form a 'coalition of interested parties' which creates niches which guarantee German a frequent use. In the light of the abundance of its functions, the paper suggests the concept 'additional language of society' for a variety such as German in the Baltics - since there seems to be no adequate alternative labelling which would do justice to all societal roles. The paper argues that this concept may also be used for languages in similar societal situations and, not least, be useful in language marketing and the promotion of multilingualism.

Education is seen as a resource at a global level but is currently considered to be in crisis in many parts of the world. This constitutes a significant drawback in terms of humanity's prosperity and well-being since education is the key not only to an educated workforce but also to humane, collaborative, and caring societies. Even within this dim landscape, there are certain educational systems that defy the odds and perform significantly higher than their otherwise comparable systems. This paper proposes using an unusual lens for educational policy comparative studies, that of positive deviance, to aid us in progressing towards a more stable educational state of affairs. Using a positive deviance methodology, which focuses on learning what is working well in systems that defy and overcome substantial challenges, this study investigates the patterns, attitudes, and actions of three selected cases: Massachusetts as a positive deviant in the US, Estonia as a positive deviant in Europe, and Castile-Leon as a positive deviant in Spain. The purpose is, by analysing educational policies, laws, and other related documents, to find commonalities that explain why these systems outperform others. The results of the comparative analysis pinpoint areas and strategies informative to those leading struggling educational systems, such as a strong commitment to equity and justice, placing teachers at the centre of reforms, using assessment as a tool for process monitoring and summative inquiry, and making preschool education accessible to all.

Soviet higher education had a distinctive institutional landscape. It combined two institutional types in a uniform model that embedded higher education in the national economy. This paper focuses on the post-Soviet system-level changes in the institutional landscape in all 15 countries of the former USSR. It shows that over last three decades the Soviet two-type institutional model evolved into a three-type model, with the specialized university as a new institutional type. Highlighting the instruments of horizontal and vertical differentiation for each country, the paper explains how structural reforms and market forces led to the rise of the university/multiversity form of institution, and the strengthening of vertical stratification at system level. The comparative analysis shows that there have been different patterns of transformation in the 15 countries, shaped by unique combinations of structural reforms and marketization policies, with certain countries having made more distinctive steps away from the Soviet institutional model. There are now 15 formally different systems of higher education which poses further questions for comparative analysis.

Multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) research has made significant progress in modelling collaboration quality for the purpose of understanding collaboration behaviour and building automated collaboration estimation models. Deploying these automated models in authentic classroom scenarios, however, remains a challenge. This paper presents findings from an evaluation of collaboration quality estimation models. We collected audio, video and log data from two different Estonian schools. These data were used in different combinations to build collaboration estimation models and then assessed across different subjects, different types of activities (collaborative-writing, group-discussion) and different schools. Our results suggest that the automated collaboration model can generalize to the context of different schools but with a 25% degradation in balanced accuracy (from 82% to 57%). Moreover, the results also indicate that multimodality brings more performance improvement in the case of group-discussion-based activities than collaborative-writing-based activities. Further, our results suggest that the video data could be an alternative for understanding collaboration in authentic settings where higher-quality audio data cannot be collected due to contextual factors. The findings have implications for building automated collaboration estimation systems to assist teachers with monitoring their collaborative classrooms.

Based on the expectancy-value perspective on identity and identity formation, this paper explores the relationship between math identity (MI) and the dimensions of motivation (i.e. intrinsic value, attainment value, utility value and perceived competence) and math achievement in primary school. An additional aim of our research was to explore these relationships in different cultural contexts and investigate potential gender and grade differences concerning MI. The participants were 11,782 primary school students from Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, Portugal and Serbia. All predictors from the motivation spectrum were significant for students' MI across the examined countries and had a stronger association with MI than math achievement. Among the motivational dimensions, intrinsic value had the strongest association with students' MI. Boys had significantly more positive math identities than girls in Estonia, Finland, Norway and Portugal. The results showed that the grade 4 students perceived themselves less as "math persons" than their grade 3 peers in all countries.

Teacher beliefs and practices related to them could provide varying opportunities for students to develop their agency related to learning math. The aim of the current paper is to explore how different math teacher beliefs (concerning the nature of mathematics, constructivist beliefs, and self-efficacy) relate to different dimensions of student agency in primary education. A two-level multilevel model was analyzed to find out to what extent selected teacher beliefs are associated with student math competence and agency dimensions. The study was conducted in Estonia and data from 3rd and 4th grade students (N = 1557) and their teachers (N = 121) was included in the analysis. The results showed that teacher self-efficacy beliefs, constructivist beliefs, and static views on the nature of mathematics were related to students' agency dimensions. Possible explanations and directions for further studies are discussed.

School-home communication is a growing research field in social sciences, particularly in education sciences and communication studies. While previous studies have paid much attention to the importance of school-home interaction in supporting primary academic socialisation and progress of elementary school pupils, the role of teacher-parent communication and collaboration in influencing the development of children's and adolescents' digital skills remains an under-researched area. This paper employed thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with education experts in six European countries, providing an insight into their opinions and views on the problems in communication between homes and schools. The analysis identified main problems in and obstacles to school-home collaboration on children's digital skills development, and the changes the COVID-19 pandemic brought along in this field of education. The paper provides five policy recommendations for enhancing school-home collaboration on digital skills development.

This paper sheds light on the impact of the digital platforms' enhancement and usage of latest synchronous and asynchronous teaching-learning platforms through a global virtual project involving business schools across five countries. The study focuses on how technology involved in the learning-teaching process at different business schools has affected the commitment of undergraduates and graduates in the post-COVID era. Furthermore, the paper discusses how the global virtual teams of students has increased their motivation in their studies. The paper is based on a blended learning international collaboration (BLIC) project involving 150 students participating in global virtual collaboration via different digital platforms in classes on International Management and International Business. The study results show, that with computer-supported collaborative learning, students across all involved business schools have been highly committed and motivated in conducting their assignments. The paper shows that the enhancement and utilization of digital platforms in face-to-face and online classes in International Business and International Management, within this virtual collaboration, has provided the students with new knowledge and has held motivation high throughout the project.

The present paper analyses 70 retrospective narratives from young adults about their school life. It looks for answers to the questions of what people and situations young adults recall as sources of positive or negative feelings and how they (re)construct the impacts of school experiences on their lives as young adults. The analysis found that on one hand a cohesive and safe school climate was a source of high self-esteem, well-being and a sense of belonging to the school, while on the other, peer bullying and the difficulties of teachers in coping with complex situations in the classroom were the most persistent problems in the school atmosphere that the young adults recalled as negative. However, the narrators re-construct some negative past experiences into positives, both individually and collectively.

Teachers in Estonia are working in a tense environment of conflicting expectations which, on the one hand, involves a neoliberal approach to standards and, on the other, the humanistic values of education and well-being of students. The purpose of the study was to identify the factors of school climate which ensure both the job satisfaction of teachers and the satisfaction of students, and to analyse the impact of these factors on the teacher-student relationship. The findings are based on the results of interviews with teachers (n=40) and students (n=39) and the results of student questionnaires (n=139) conducted in four schools. The teachers and students who were satisfied with the school and their job perceived the teacher-student relationship through the following aspects: the potential of students, openness to knowledge, the recognition of personal qualities, equal treatment and taking students into account. Despite the external turbulence in the Estonian school system, all schools still have the autonomy to transform their school into an oasis where all parties feel satisfied.

Ethical and sustainable thinking is an important competence in the engineering education to support students' abilities to act and perform in a responsible manner in corporate contexts, and consequently contribute to a sustainable future. This paper investigates engineering students' attitudes towards ethical and sustainable thinking focusing on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) principles in the context of entrepreneurship courses as a part of larger research project. Engineering students from a Finnish and an Estonian university (N = 342) responded to a self-assessment survey. The students' attitudes towards CSR principles were assessed both on the enterprise level and the individual level as expectations of potential future employees. The findings indicate that engineering students acknowledge the need to take into account responsible thinking and that it is important for enterprises to be both socially and environmentally responsible in their activities. The self-assessment tool of ethical and sustainable thinking associated with the entrepreneurship competence model and CSR principles can be helpful in practice when university teachers wish to support and assess their students' attitudes towards CSR principles among other entrepreneurship competencies when creating new course content.

One way to support student teachers learning is by offering them different opportunities to reflect on their own and others' practice. The use of videos is seen as an effective opportunity to support the professional development of teacher education students. This study aimed to find out what are the students' hesitations related to video recording their own teaching and watching the videos of peers, and what do students learn from watching videos of their own and peers teaching. The data was collected from 33 Estonian student teachers, with a written open-ended questionnaire. and was analysed by using qualitative inductive content analysis method. Results indicate that student teachers' hesitations were related to their personal matters, and to pedagogical and content knowledge. Student teachers learned how to cope during the lessons, and new instructional strategies. Their fears about being recorded decreased with the experience. The results are further discussed in the paper.

The study of variables related to the use of ICT in the classroom is a topic of interest that has been frequently researched. In this paper, after examining the importance of teacher training in explaining the use of ICT in the classroom, we focused on analysing the weight of variables related to teaching practices and the organisational context of schools, which are variables that are less frequently addressed in the literature. To do so, a secondary analysis was carried out using data provided by the Teaching and Learning International Study (TALIS 2018). Specifically, we worked with a sample of 3,918 principals and 64,899 teachers from a total of 3921 schools in 21 countries. A multilevel binary regression model with random intercept, fixed coefficients and a two-level structure with teachers at level 1 and schools at level 2 was used. The results indicate that the presence of ICT in the classroom is associated with self-efficacy in teaching and the cognitive activation of students and with the organisational aspects of the school, which are scarcely addressed by the existing literature on this topic of interest, such as school climate, educational innovation and cooperation among teachers. Based on these results, we reflect on possible ways to promote the use of ICT in the classroom.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused some serious setbacks in primary and secondary education wordlwide. In 2021, the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (MoER) contracted a group of researchers and expert teachers to design and validate of a set of innovative digital learning resources that support personalized learning paths to meet the needs of a diverse learners trying to work on their knowledge gaps caused by pandemic. This paper presents the results of designing a set of innovative open educational resources for 9th grade mathematics and piloting these in nine pilot schools. Based on the analysis of the results, we identified the main technological and pedagogical challenges in supporting flexible learning paths with interactive digital learning resources in post-COVID mathematics education.

The use of virtual labs in higher education is gaining growing interest, with different debates in the literature about their role in addressing learning outcomes and balancing hands-on activities. This study seeks to understand how labs can be virtualised and thus structured to contribute to engineering education, by adopting an innovative perspective in studying the labs themselves as core assets to be developed for teaching and learning. Following the precepts of grounded theory, we performed a multi-case study of nine labs that underwent a process of virtualisation and their role within three programs of engineering education. Findings revealed (1) the dynamics in uncovering and exploiting the potentialities of different virtualisation paths, by overcoming difficulties in funding or a wider use in different courses, (2) the structural needs, such as stakeholder collaboration specifics and technical update intensity, and (3) the importance of education and research specifics in driving the design and development of virtualised labs. The pattern analysis of the relation between these features guided the development of a typology of virtualised labs that can be ascribed to three structuring phases - identified as foundational, intermediate, and advanced - and constitute the key contribution of this paper for both theory and practice.

Purpose: This study examines diaspora engagement and return migration programs aimed at providing diaspora youth with an opportunity to obtain higher education in Estonia and Kazakhstan. In particular, the authors sought to identify the main motivations, benefits and challenges of the programs, as well as understand how the programs contribute to the ethnic identity formation of diaspora students. Design/methodology/approach: The paper employed a qualitative multiple-case study research design. In both countries, data were collected by means of 26 semi-structured interviews with return migrant students and experts involved in implementing the programs. Findings: The study findings suggest that the primary motivations for diaspora youth to return to their homelands are tuition-free higher education, financial support and repatriation prospects in both countries. In Estonia, the scholarship holders struggled with language requirements for university admissions, the cost of living insufficiently covered by the monthly stipend and limited integration opportunities. In Kazakhstan, the students had to face the Russian language barrier and socio-cultural marginalization in their everyday life. It was also found that the return migrant students in Estonia and Kazakhstan develop hybrid identities to integrate into their domestic society. They reinforce their ethnic identities and negotiate their diasporic identities to make sense of their own background and cultural heritage and acclimatize to life in the new context. Originality/value: The study provides practical implications for policy implementers and policymakers in Estonia and Kazakhstan. It can also be useful for the worldwide research community interested in exploring education-oriented diaspora engagement and return migration programs and their influence on the ethnic identity of diaspora students.

Online courses have become an increasingly attractive format for delivering teacher training. However, the low retention rates are a critical and still unsolved issue. This paper presents the results of a randomized controlled trial aimed at testing the impact of a personalized support model on teachers' retention in online training courses. The support consisted of a package of nine messages triggered by teachers' characteristics and their specific (in)actions on the course platform. The study involved 3,777 lower-secondary education professional and student teachers from nine European Union Member States and Turkey, who were invited to participate in four new online courses in school year 2018/2019. The experimental estimates show that the offered support increased course completion by 10 percentage points among professional teachers in EU Member States, while it had no effects among student teachers nor in Turkey. Implications for online teacher training providers--such as the importance of reaching out to participants with poor online training experience and who do not start the courses in time--are discussed.

Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) has huge potential for extending the work beyond traditional learning analytics for the capabilities of leveraging multiple data modalities (e.g. physiological data, digital tracing data). To shed a light on its applications and academic development, a systematic bibliometric analysis was conducted in this paper. Specifically, we examine the following aspects: (1) Analyzing the yearly publication and citation trends since the year 2010; (2) Recognizing the most prolific countries, institutions, and authors in this field; (3) Identifying the collaborative patterns among countries, institutions, and authors, respectively; (4) Tracing the evolving procedure of the applied keywords and development of the research topics during the last decade. These analytic tasks were conducted on 194 carefully selected articles published since 2010. The analytical results revealed an increasing trend in the number of publications and citations, identified the prominent institutions and scholars with significant academic contributions to the area, and detected the topics (e.g. characterizing learning processes using multimodal data, implementing ubiquitous learning platforms) that received the most attention. Finally, we also highlighted the current research hotspots attempting to initiate potential interdisciplinary collaborations to promote further progress in the area of MMLA.

This paper contributes to understanding the role of task conflicts in team-based online learning. The X-Culture network has created an online learning community that involves students all over the world. Correlation and regression analysis revealed that a higher diversity of teams by nationality positively affected team performance. The indirect effect of team diversity on team performance mediated by task conflicts accounted for 59.6% of the total effect. Moderate task conflicts improved team performance. However, instructors and coaches have to prepare students at the early stage of their project cooperation to distinguish between task conflicts and relationship conflicts influenced by motivation, free riding, and online communication habits of team members living in different time zones. Suggestions for preparing students to manage conflicts in online international team projects are presented. These suggestions are relevant for innovative learning projects in higher education involving students from many countries to knowledge co-creation.

Purpose: This paper aimed to examine moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) levels in physical education. Method: A review of reviews was conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. The screening process, data extraction, assessment of the risk of bias, and analysis of the results were carried out independently by two reviewers. A total of eight systematic reviews from six databases, which included 224 studies, involving more than 80,000 students (elementary, middle, and high school), enrolled in more than 450 schools worldwide were unpacked. Results: Students fail to meet the 50% recommendation of MVPA lesson time, irrespective of country, school stage, gender, or MVPA measures. Physical education-based interventions increased students' MVPA during lessons (range 14.3%-24%) compared with control groups. Conclusion: Physical education is uniquely positioned to provide physical activity opportunities for students, but teachers must target the provision of adequate MVPA levels, which is not currently happening.

Since the last curriculum reform in 2011, all Estonian lower-secondary students have to conduct a year-long creative work. Unfortunately, in many cases, it is implemented as an individual written report that has little to do with improving learners' digital competence or Computational Thinking skills. In the new national curriculum (to be in force from 2023), an alternative model is proposed for creative project work inspired by how the software development teams are working today: agile, collaborative design, rapid prototyping, and emphatic involvement of the target group. This paper introduces the process and the results of design-based research aimed at prototyping and piloting a set of learning resources (templates, tutorials, examples, etc.) for the redefined, collaborative creative project.

This study explores schools' digital maturity self-evaluation reports' data from Estonia. Based on quantitative data (N = 499) the schools that attempt digital transformation were clustered into three successive digital improvement types. The paper describes 3 main patterns of school improvement in different phases of innovative change: classroom innovation practices' driven schools, participatory led structural change driven schools; and inclusive and evidence based change management type of schools. The defining variables for digital transformation towards new levels of digital maturity were teachers' role, digital competences, learning organization culture, participatory management, inclusive leadership, structural changes and network, and IT-manager involvement to structural changes.

Given the expected advantages for individuals and societies, financial literacy is high on the policy agenda in many countries. This paper reports the results from a unique survey conducted on a sample of 13-16-year-old students in five European countries, aimed at measuring and comparing their level of financial literacy skills. The results indicate significant differences in the level of financial literacy across countries that are interpreted in the light of the differences in the countries' educational policies and experiences with financial education. The findings suggest that supra-national coordinated action is needed to guarantee better financial knowledge and safeguard economic stability in future crises.