The value of open data in targeting education policies

While the value of open content is well known within the scientific and academic community, opening up academic data for reuse is critical in order to assess and target current education policies in order to ensure an accurate response to society’s demands. In the final analysis, opening up public sector information encourages participation and  the real, active involvement of citizens in the definition and execution of those policies.

What kind of data do public education administrations safeguard? According to the Open Education Hand Book produced by OKF, educational information can be categorised in five different segments:

1. Student data: grades, skills, exams, homework;
2. Course data: curriculum, syllabus, digital literacy;
3. Institution data: success/failure rates, teacher profile;
4. User-generated data as learning analytics;
5. Policy/Government data: spending, investment or participation.

The report Empowering Parents, Improving Accountability shows how open data helps understand better the functioning of the education system and promotes citizen collaboration in this process. In 2013 the Mexican project Mejora tu Escuela (“Improve your School” in Spanish) was launched to this end; an online platform that provides parents and students with information about school quality, performance and results. Thanks to the data, each school is assessed by a “traffic light system” which helps Mexican education policy makers detect the vulnerabilities of the national system.

Releasing and giving access to data not only increases the efficiency of local educational centres, but also measures the impact of school policies in different parts of the planet. In fact, the World Bank, under the SABER initiative, has created a site comparing education policies of  100 different countries in order to improve education around the world. The platform provides an interactive map to review data and visualise each country’s performance in different categories: early childhood development, school autonomy or accountability.

Open data is so important for education policies that, in the latest edition of the International Open Data Conference, a panel was held to examine how open data can be used to improve education systems. The Open Syllabus Project was one of the practice cases presented in the session.

This Columbia University initiative has created an online database with the learning material most frequently used by US universities after gathering more than 1,000,000 syllabi. Thanks to the stored information, users can collate education programs and policies from the different US states. At the same time, the platform can be used for the development of new research, teaching and administrative tools.

Data can also become the perfect raw material that allows the infomediary sector to create innovative services which meet educational needs. In Colombia, the Analítica Académica company, aware of the potential of public information, reuses the data related to students, teachers and educational processes to develop technological solutions that help higher education centres in their decision making.

However, educational data management does not only take place in the university context. Initiatives such as Open School Kenya show how the re-use of information can be decisive for local primary education programs. Using OpenStreet Map, this project has opened up and made accessible private and public sector information, building a map which locates the 339 schools in one the suburbs of Kibera. This visualisation not only informs citizens about school opportunities but also helps allocate resources, build new schools and improve the quality of local educations.

Five different initiatives with a common denominator: the re-use of public sector information to guide education policies in their respective countries. In each case, society’s needs have been identified and the public data have been transformed into solutions which impact the education systems at local, regional or national level.