Innovating Professional Development in Compulsory Education

This report comprises the key outcomes and final analysis of the study Innovating Professional Development in Compulsory Education. It aims to help education authorities face the challenges of meeting the professional development needs of tomorrow's teachers in Europe and elsewhere. This report focuses on innovative and emergent practices of teacher Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and professional learning by teaching professionals who work in compulsory education. The first part of the study gathered an inventory of 30 examples illustrating new and innovative models and practices that have emerged to overcome the known barriers and limitations that teachers say hinder them today from participating in CPD. An accompanying Technical Report looks at their key elements and uses seven labels to describe and analyse the broad areas in which innovation currently takes place (Vuorikari, 2018). The labels are not categorical, and many of the examples feature many of them. This report further analyses the inventory of models and practices focusing on their innovative aspects. The 30 examples were classified according to their type of innovation representing product innovation as well as process, organisational and marketing innovation allowing for a discussion on the innovative aspects of the emergent practices in teacher professional development and professional learning. The key outcomes of the study are discussed in a cross-case analysis with the help of the above-mentioned seven broad areas. Lastly, together with providing conclusions, a number of policy pointers are given in order to better inspire and support those who plan and design policies and provision of teacher professional development and professional learning.JRC.B.4-Human Capital and Employmen

Ecology of social search for learning resources

Vuorikari, R., & Koper, R. (2009). Ecology of social search for learning resources. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 26(4), 272-286.Purpose: This paper deals with user-generated Interest indicators (ratings, bookmarks and tags). We answer two research questions: can search strategies based on Social Information Retrieval (SIR) make the discovery of learning resources more efficient for users, and can Community search help users discover a wider variety of cross-boundary resources. By cross-boundary we mean that the user and resource come from different countries and that the language of the resource is different from that of the user’s mother tongue. Design: We focus on a portal that access a federation of multilingual learning resource repositories. We collect users’ attentional metadata based on a server-side logging scheme and use this empirical data to answer two hypotheses. Findings: The search-play-annotation ratio is more efficient with Social Information Retrieval strategies, but Community browsing alone does not help users to discover more cross-boundary resources. Practical implications: By social tagging and bookmarking resources from a variety of repositories, users create underlying connections between resources that otherwise do not cross-reference, for example, via hyperlinks. This is important for bringing them under the umbrella of SIR methods. Future studies should include testing wider range of SIR methods to leverage these user-made connections between resources that originate from a number of countries and are in a variety of languages. Originality: The use of attentional metadata to model the ecology of social search adds value to the actors of learning object economy, e.g. educational institutions, digital libraries and their managers, content providers, policy makers, educators and learners

Learning networks for professional development:Current research approaches and future trends

Learning networks are technology supported communities through which learners share knowledge with each other and jointly develop new knowledge (Sloep & Berlanga, 2011). This way, learning networks enrich the experience of continuous professional development and lifelong learning. Examples of learning networks for professional development are communities of employees who want to improve customer services, lawyers who want exchange knowledge and experience, and communities of teachers who exchange their experiences and seek for collaboration. Learning networks that support activities for educational professionals is enjoying increasing interest, see for instance Cloudworks (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/), Tapped-In (http://tappedin.org), or eTwinning (www.etwinning.net). However, the full potential and added value of these networks could be maximised if new frameworks, tools and techniques would be developed (Schlager, et al., 2009). A case in point is the European project Teacher’s Lifelong Learning Networks (Tellnet). This project aims to study professional development networks by exploring analysis and visualisation techniques to identify relevant structures and patterns, and to specify performance indicators for facilitating collaboration, innovation and creativity of teachers. Tools are investigated to foster peer-support, collaboration, and increase social capital. Moreover, specific future scenarios on the role of teacher networks for learning are developed, bringing together the evidence found with emerging social and technical trends in Europe. The above mentioned eTwinning network is taken as study case. eTwinning promotes teacher and school collaboration through the use of ICT. It is a large online network (over 150.000 European teachers) in which teachers can work with each other and learn from each other. Through this network, collaborative cross-border school projects can be started on a wide variety of subjects, e.g. having multiple primary school students working together and learning about different cultures. Additionally, teachers can attend a variety of professional development activities, such as online Groups or Learning Labs to improving both personal and professional teaching skills. The aim of this symposium is to present current Tellnet efforts that aim to understand and enhance learning networks for professional development. This includes contributions that attempt to answer questions such as: how network learning can contribute to successful continuous professional development and competence building? How could learning analytics be used in order to identify benefits of learning networks, such as social capital? What will be the role of networks in the coming years? Answering these questions requires a holistic approach that considers pedagogical and technical underpinnings, as well as individual, social and organizational aspects

DigComp 2.2. Annex 2. Citizens Interacting with AI Systems

Today, for citizens to engage confidently, critically and safely with new and emerging technologies, including systems driven by artificial intelligence (AI), they need to acquire a basic understanding of such tools and technologies (DEAP2). Greater awareness will also lead to improved sensibility towards potential issues related to data protection and privacy, ethics, children’s rights and bias – including accessibility, gender bias and disabilities. The DigComp 2.2 update addresses the topic of citizens interacting with AI systems rather than focusing on the knowledge about Artificial Intelligence per se (see Box 6)

Innovating Professional Development in Compulsory Education

Meeting the professional development needs of tomorrow's teachers is a challenge that education authorities face in Europe and elsewhere. This report focuses on innovative and emergent practices of teacher professional development and professional learning among teaching professionals who work in compulsory education. We set to look out for ways that have emerged to overcome the known barriers and limitations that teachers say hinder them today from participating in professional development activities. Our study gathers 30 examples that well illustrate new emergent features at a general level. The study is descriptive and it is based on desk research and a number of interviews. This report forms the first part of the study called Innovating Professional Development in Compulsory Education. It comprises the main data and documentation gathered for the study. The main results and analysis are reported elsewhere in a JRC Science for Policy report called “Innovating Professional Development in Compulsory Education - An analysis of practices aimed at improving teacher PD” (Vuorikari, 2019). After the Executive Summary, this report starts with an introduction (Section 2). Following that, a methodological note describes the steps taken for the whole study (Section 3). The main part, Section 4, describes the examples and groups them according to their focus of innovation. For that purpose, seven labels were created which are not categorical: School as a learning organisation; Empowering learners through competence-oriented approach; Innovating online delivery; Re-inventing blended learning; Engaging in first-hand experiences; Innovating degree programmes; and Innovating partnerships and new actors. A short concluding note is given in Section 5. Finally, the report also includes a number of in-depth case studies (Annex 2).JRC.B.4-Human Capital and Employmen

Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context

Vuorikari, R. (2009). Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context. Doctoral thesis. November, 13, 2009, Heerlen, The Netherlands: Open University of the Netherlands, CELSTEC.This thesis studies social tagging of learning resources in a multilingual context. Social tagging and its end products, tags, are regarded as part of the learning resources metadata ecology. The term “metadata ecology” is used to mean the interrelation of conventional metadata and social tags, and their interaction with the environment, which can be understood as the repository in the large sense (resources, metadata, interfaces and underlying technology) and its community of users. The main hypothesis is that the self-organisation aspect of a social tagging system on a learning resource portal helps users discover learning resources more efficiently. Moreover, user-generated tags make the system, which operates in a multilingual context, more robust and flexible. Social tags offer an interesting aspect to study learning resources, its metadata and how users interact with them in a multilingual context. Tags, as opposed to conventional metadata description such as Learning Object Metadata (LOM), are free, non-hierarchical keywords that end-users associate with a digital artefact, e.g. a learning resource. Tags are formed by a triple of (user,item,tag). Tags and the resulting networks, folksonomies, are commonly modelled as tri- partite hypergraphs. This ternary relational structure gives rise to a number of novel relations to better understand, capture and model contextual information. This thesis first provides two exploratory studies to better understand how users tag learning resources in a multilingual context and to find evidence on the “cross-boundary use” of learning resources. The term cross-boundary use means that the user and the resource come from different countries and that the language of the resource is different from that of the user’s mother tongue. The second part introduces a trilogy of studies focusing on self-organisation, flexibility and robustness of a social tagging system using empirical, behavioural data captured from log-files and user’s attention metadata trails on a number of learning resource portals and platforms in a multilingual context