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Teaching and learning are increasingly being offered in distributed, online digital environments, often openly and at large-scale, traversing spatial and temporal boundaries. Within such environments, Learning Analytics technologies aim to provide the means for tracking and making sense of the multitude of educational data that is being generated, in order to inform educational and pedagogical decision making of different actors, such as learners, teachers, school leaders and parents. However, at the heart of Learning Analytics technologies in such distributed and open learning environments lies the Open Learner Model (OLM), that informs the data collection, processing and sense-making capabilities of the analytics technology. In this context the contribution of this chapter is to present a generic educational data-driven layered Open Learner Modelling framework, which can be used as a blueprint for the analysis (and design) of OLM instances. Furthermore, capitalizing on this framework, the chapter also performs a critical analysis of existing research in OLM works, in order to draw conclusions on the current status of this emerging field. more...

Deeper learning (DL) has emerged at the spotlight of educational policies around the world and has gained significant attention from various stakeholders in education (teachers, school leaders, curricula designers, policy makers). This is the result of DL being associated to core competences of the current and future workplaces such as problem-solving, critical thinking, self-regulated learning, and effective collaboration, which are considered as essential for building innovative solutions to wicked global challenges. However, despite this well-acknowledged trend research related to modeling, cultivating and assessing Deeper Learning competences is still at a shaping stage. This is also reflected in the rather limited advancements in the use of digital educational technologies to support the assessment and measurement of DL. In this context, the contribution of this chapter is to perform a systematic literature review of the current state on existing works for modeling DL competences, teaching approaches applied to cultivate them as well as, methods and instruments proposed for assessing and measuring DL. more...

The concept of Smart Cities is an emerging social and technology innovation, attracting large public and private investments at a global scale, arguing for the effective exploitation of digital technologies to drive quality of living and sustainable growth. However, these investments mainly focus in smart technical infrastructure, and they have yet to be systematically complemented with efforts to prepare the human capital of future smart cities in terms of core competences anticipated for exploiting their potential. In this context, this chapter introduces “cyber-physical learning” as a generic overarching model to cultivate Digital Smart Citizenship competence. The proposed approach exploits the potential of Internet of Things technologies to create authentic blended and augmented learning experiences. Proof-of-concept case studies of the proposed cyber-physical learning approach, to develop smart household energy management competences, are presented and discussed as a field of application. Finally, the findings of a survey with university students for eliciting their attitudes to engage with cyber-physical learning environments for enhancing their digital smart citizenship competences are reported. more...

Teacher inquiry is identified as a key global need for driving the continuous improvement of the teaching and learning conditions for learners. However, specific barriers (mainly related to teachers’ data literacy competences), can defer teachers from engaging with inquiry to improve their teaching practice. To alleviate these barriers and support teacher inquiry, the concept of Teaching and Learning Analytics (TLA) has been proposed, as a complementing synergy between Teaching Analytics and Learning Analytics. Teaching and Learning Analytics aims to provide a framework in which the insights generated by Learning Analytics methods and tools can become meaningfully translated for driving teachers’ inquiry to improve their teaching practice, captured through Teaching Analytics methods and tools. In this context, TLA have been identified as a research challenge with significant practical impact potential. This chapter contributes the first systematic literature review in the emerging research field of Teaching and Learning Analytics. The insights gained from the systematic literature review aim to (a) transparently outline the existing state-of-the-art following a structured analysis methodology, as well as (b) elicit insights and shortcomings which could inform future work in the Teaching and Learning Analytics research field. more...

The emerging Flipped Classroom approach has been widely used to enhance teaching practices in many subject domains and educational levels, reporting promising results for enhancing student learning experiences. However, despite this encouraging body of research, the subject domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) teaching at K-12 education has not yet been explicitly researched. This is a considerable shortcoming given (a) the globally acknowledged need to effectively design and deliver ICT curricula to students at all levels of school education (primary, junior and senior secondary) towards cultivation of digital competences, and (b) the recurring research evidence that the Flipped Classroom approach can enhance students' learning experiences in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) K-12 education. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is the design and implementation of an action research for studying the effect of the Flipped Classroom approach in K-12 ICT teaching and learning. The action research employed a quasi-experimental design using experimental-control groups, from two classes (a total of 46 students) for an entire semester of the school year following the National (Greek) Curriculum in junior high school ICT studies. The results of this study provide evidence for potential advantages in students' cognitive learning outcomes related to subject domain knowledge, the exploitation of teaching time during the classroom face-to-face sessions, the students' level of motivation, as well as their level of engagement. This article of the Journal of Educational Technology & Society is available under Creative Commons CC-BY-ND-NC 3.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). more...

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education has been associated with the need for cultivating students’ inquiry and problem-solving skills by exploiting appropriate student-centered teaching approaches. At the same time, the Flipped Classroom (FC) model has been proposed as a blended learning means to enhance such teaching approaches by effectively reallocating their learning activity distribution towards maximizing student engagement and scaffolding by the teachers. In order to reap the benefits of FC-enhanced teaching approaches when designing and delivering their STEM learning interventions, however, teachers (especially novices) could benefit from having access to “generic” teaching model templates that they can adjust in their specific needs. In this context, we have introduced a set of FC-enhanced teaching model templates focusing on two widely used STEM-appropriate teaching models, i.e., the Inquiry- and Problem-based teaching models. Capitalizing on this, the contribution of this chapter is the presentation of the implementations of the aforementioned teaching templates in Moodle, a widely used open source Learning Management System. The anticipated added value of the proposed adaptable Moodle templates is to provide support to (novice) STEM teachers, not only in their educational design (through the use of the proposed FC-enhanced teaching model templates), but also in the delivery of their lessons and/or educational scenarios. more...

Lesson plans (LPs) are a commonly used method for capturing and disseminating teaching practice within online teachers’ communities. Nevertheless, there are no commonly accepted and appropriately designed models for representing LPs. This shortcoming is also mirrored in the existing LP authoring tools, with each of them accommodating a different subset of the overall LP elements. To address this issue, we have proposed an educational Design-driven LP Representation Metadata Model (LPRM) which (a) comprises and extends a range of existing dimensions to model LPs and (b) is structured based on the ADDIE Educational Design Model. Capitalizing on this, the contribution of this chapter is the critical evaluation of a set of widely used LP authoring tools in terms of the level of accommodation they offer for the elements of the proposed LPRM. The findings of evaluation are used to highlight shortcomings and to propose guidelines for driving future implementations of LP authoring tools, towards enhancing the capacity of teachers to robustly capture and share their teaching practice. more...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent trend in the field of online learning. Their potential distinctive educational innovation is attributed mainly to their “Massiveness” and “Openness” dimensions. These two characteristics introduce new educational design considerations for accommodating the challenging demands of “Massiveness” and “Openness.” This is particularly pressing, since commonly recognized “shortcomings” of MOOCs, such as high participant drop-out rates and low levels of participant engagement and motivation, have been associated to the educational design of MOOCs. Within this context, this chapter discusses issues related with the educational design of MOOCs with emphasis to cultural and motivational issues, presents an analysis of existing educational design frameworks and/or guidelines for MOOCs and, finally, proposes an ADDIE-based educational design considerations framework (EDCF) for MOOCs, which incorporate the “Massiveness” and “Openness” requirements. more...

Providing appropriate tool-supported guidance to students is an essential aspect of technology-supported inquiry-based STEM education, in order to facilitate them in engaging in diverse inquiry tasks. However, analyzing educational designs and evaluating the level of tool-supported guidance provided towards reflective remedying actions is not a trivial task, especially for novice STEM teachers. In this context, the paper presents the design and preliminary evaluation of an inquiry-based STEM Teaching Analytics Tool. This tool aims to visually analyze and evaluate existing educational designs in terms of the level of technology-supported guidance they offer and support teachers' reflective (re) design. The preliminary evaluation results attest to the high levels of accuracy of the proposed Teaching Analytics Tool and provide evidence of its capacity to inform future Teaching and Learning Analytics tools for facilitating STEM teachers to engage in data-driven reflective (re) design of their practice. more...

Data-driven decision-making in education has received an increasing level of attention on a global scale, especially with the raising interest on big data. This trend has led to the development of two core analytics strands, namely Academic Analytics and Learning Analytics. The former focuses mainly on the macro layer of the organization and is addressed to higher education, while the latter focuses mainly on the micro/meso layers of the organization. Considering the diverse focal points and contexts of application of the two existing analytics strands, the ecosystemic nature of K-12 schools as social complex adaptive systems, as well as, the need for data-based evidence-driven school complexity leadership, we claim that a holistic decision support approach for addressing the full spectrum of school leaders’ tasks is required, beyond the existing analytics strands. Therefore, in this book chapter, we introduce the concept of School Analytics as a holistic, multilevel analytics framework aiming to integrate data collected from all micro-, meso- and macro- organizational layers. We analyze them in an intertwining manner towards providing continuous feedback loops and systemic decision support to K-12 school leaders. more...

Schools are complex adaptive systems comprising a vast range of interrelating agents including among others, the school principals, teachers, students, parents, and infrastructural assets. Therefore, school leaders are required to design the strategic plan of their schools by taking into account the full spectrum of the characteristics and behaviors of these agents and the complex manner in which they interrelate and affect the overall school performance. However, considering (a) the high complexity in collecting and processing the institution-wide data and towards generating feedback loops and (b) the wide range of the tasks that school leaders are expected to engage with, this data-driven decision-making process is challenging, and requires appropriate systems to support it. The contribution of this book chapter, therefore, is the critical analysis of 70 existing school leadership decision support systems (SL-DSS), in terms of their capacity to adequately support the full spectrum of school leadership tasks, as they are defined in this book chapter. This critical analysis aims to gather insights that could drive future implementations of SL-DSS toward providing more effective decision support affordances and tackling the identified shortcomings of existing systems. more...

In all European countries, initiatives are implemented towards promoting the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools. However, the current level of school ICT uptake remains low, due to the interrelation of a wide range of factors, including teachers' ICT competences and strategic school Leadership planning. In this context, there is a need for systems that will facilitate schools in capturing the contribution of these factors and meaningfully process the data for informed strategic planning. The aim of this paper is to present a web-based system, namely the ASK School ICT Competence Management System, which takes a step towards the aforementioned needs for effective school ICT uptake monitoring and management. more...