Bringing Open Data into Danish Schools and its Potential Impact on School Pupils

Mubashrah Saddiqa, Lise Lykke Le Maire Munksgaard Rasmussen, Rikke Magnussen, Birger Larsen, Jens Myrup Pedersen, 2019

Private and public institutions are using open and public data to provide better services, which increases the impact of open data on daily life. With the advancement of technology, it becomes also important to equip our younger generation with the essential skills for future challenges. In order to bring up a generation equipped with 21st century skills, open data could facilitate educational processes at school level as an educational resource. Open data could acts as a key resource to enhance the understanding of data through critical thinking and ethical vision among the youth and school pupils. To bring open data into schools, it is important to know the teacher's perspective on open data literacy and its possible impact on pupils.

As a research contribution, we answered these questions through a Danish public school teacher's survey where we interviewed 10 Danish public school teachers of grade 5-7th and analyzed their views about the impact of open data on pupils' learning development. After analyzing Copenhagen city's open data, we identified four open data educational themes that could facilitate different subjects, e.g. geography, mathematics, basic science and social science. The survey includes interviews, open discussions, questionnaires and an experiment with the grade 7th pupils, where we test the pupils' understanding with open data.

The survey concluded that open data cannot only empower pupils to understand real facts about their local areas, improve civics awareness and develop digital and data skills, but also enable them to come up with the ideas to improve their communities.
 

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