Demetrios G. Sampson

University of Piraeus · Department of Digital Systems

Biomimicry, the practice of imitating nature to solve complex human problems, holds significant potential for sustainable education in the face of global challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change impacts. Advocates called for the integration of smart educational technologies to reduce the carbon footprint associated with traditio...

With the rapid advances of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its technologies, human teachers and machines are now capable of collaborating to effectively achieve specified outcomes. In educational settings, such collaboration requires consideration of several dimensions to ensure safe, responsible, and ethical usage. While various research studies...

The goal on this chapter is to:

The goals on this chapter are to:

The goals on this chapter are to:

This chapter presents and analyzes (i) educational data literacy (EDL) conceptual definitions and their dimensions, (ii) existing EDL or EDL-relevant competence frameworks to identify key EDL competence dimensions and core competence statements per dimension, and (iii) EDL-relevant higher education and professional development courses to identify k...

This chapter presents a working definition of educational data literacy (EDL) for digital education professionals. This definition was synthesized from seven core existing EDL definitions and five EDL competence frameworks. It has been developed to focus on the competence set which is required to be possessed by educators to give meaning to and act...

This chapter presents the exemplary learning outcomes for the two-dimensional Educational Data Literacy Competence Profile (EDL-CP) framework and the use-case examples for indicative target groups of the EDL-CP. The exemplary learning outcomes express what individuals should know, understand, and be able to do at the end of a learning process focus...

This chapter discusses conclusions and suggestions for future plans based on the lessons learnt through the development and validation of the Learn2Analyze Educational Data Literacy Competence Profile (L2A-EDL-CP). Given the lessons learnt during the L2A project life and taking into consideration the new opportunities and challenges that emerged du...

The goals on this chapter are to:

In the era of digitalization of learning and teaching processes, Educational Data Literacy (EDL) is highly valued and is becoming essential. EDL is conceptualized as the ability to collect, manage, analyse, comprehend, interpret, and act upon educational data in an ethical, meaningful, and critical manner. The professionals in the field of digitall...

This volume focuses on the implications of digital technologies for educators and educational decision makers that is not widely represented in the literature. While there are many volumes on how one might integrate a particular technology, there are no volumes on how digital technologies can or should be exploited to address the needs and propel t...

This volume provides a comprehensive and contemporary depiction of the swift evolution of learning technologies and the innovations that derive from their deployment in school education. It comprises cases studies, research focused on emergent technologies and experiments with existing tools in a wide range of scenarios. The studies included in thi...

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-solv...

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,...

Project-based learning (PjBL) has been widely promoted in educational practice, for example, computer programming education. While PiBL may help learners to connect abstract knowledge with authentic practice, the complexity of completing an authentic project may overwhelm learners, making them unable to achieve the desired learning outcomes. This s...

This book focuses on the interplay between pedagogy and technology, and their fusion for the advancement of smart learning environments. It discusses various components of this interplay, including learning and assessment paradigms, social factors and policies, emerging technologies, innovative application of mature technologies, transformation of...

This volume provides a contemporary glance at the drastically expanding field of delivering large-scale education to unprecedented numbers of learners. It compiles papers presented at the CELDA (Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age) conference, which has a goal of continuing to address these challenges and promote the effective use...

School leaders around the world are increasingly required to orchestrate their school's strategic planning in order to both meet external accountability requirements and create fostering learning environments for all students. To meet these objectives in the complex school ecosystem, leaders need to make decisions based on holistic collection and a...

School leadership is considered a core aspect of successful school improvement across the world, especially in the light of the emerging paradigms of increased school autonomy and accountability. However, despite the importance of school leadership, the definition of this concept has been perceived from diverse standpoints, leading to a multitude o...

Recent technical and infrastructural developments posit flipped (or inverted) classroom approaches ripe for exploration at all levels of formal education. Flipped classroom approaches have students use technology to access lectures and other instructional-oriented resources outside the classroom, in order to engage them in active learning during in...

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...

Notably valuable efforts have focused on helping people with special needs. In this work, we build upon the experience from the BlindHelper smartphone outdoor pedestrian navigation app and present Blind MuseumTourer, a system for indoor interactive autonomous navigation for blind and visually impaired persons and groups (e.g., pupils), which has pr...

Science education is recognized as a top priority for school education reforms worldwide. Inquiry-based teaching strategies are recognized as appropriate for supporting the development of the cognitive processes that cultivate problem solving (PS) competence, a key competence of scientific literacy. A widely used framework for assessing individual...

The aim of this volume entitled Digital Technologies: Sustainable Innovations for improving Teaching and Learning is to contribute in the global discussion on digital technologies as the means to foster sustainable educational innovations for improving the teaching, learning and assessment from K-12 to Higher Education. The book consists of four pa...

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is recognized as a top school education priority worldwide and Inquiry-based teaching and learning is identified as a promising approach. To effectively engage students in Inquiry tasks, appropriate guidance should be provided, usually by combining digital tools such online labs and...

Mobile technologies and their applications have the potential to benefit various learning contexts. Users' perceptions of mobile learning (m-learning) technologies are of great importance and precede the successful integration of these technologies in education. M-learning adoption has been investigated in the literature with reference to various f...

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-centred teaching approaches. At the same time, the Flipped Classroom (FC) model has been proposed as a blended learning means to enhance such teaching appr...

Technology-supported learning environments generate vast amount of data from learners and/or educators interactions, that can be collected and analyzed through pedagogically relevant algorithms producing even more data from these aggregations. The link between available educational data, methods for their analysis, and relevant technologies for inc...

Researchers have been working to understand the high dropout rates in computer science (CS) education. Despite the great demand for CS professionals, little is known about what influences individuals to complete their CS studies. We identify gains of studying CS, the (learning) environment, degree’s usefulness, and barriers as important predictors...

Blended learning environments supported by the Flipped Classroom Model (FCM) have been repeatedly investigated in both research and practice contexts, primarily in terms of their capacity to foster students’ cognitive learning outcomes and overall motivation for the learning process. However, despite the significant body of existing works studying...

Programming-based making activities are at the core of teaching strategies to engage young students in learning programming for developing computational thinking skills. Despite the initial evidences of enthusiastic participation in such activities, more systematic studies are needed to better understand drivers of students' intentions to participa...

Orchestrating holistic school improvement requires school leaders to effectively engage in the tasks of collecting and processing diverse educational data from the school ecosystem, and more importantly, to be able to 'translate' these analyses to specific remedying actions for targeted improvement. However, these processes can be cumbersome, espec...

Notably valuable efforts have focused in helping people with special needs. In this work, we build upon the experience from the BlindHelper smartphone outdoor pedestrian navigation app and present Blind-Nav, a system for indoor interactive autonomous navigation of blind and vision-impaired persons and groups (e.g. pupils) in museums. A pilot protot...

This study uses complexity theory to understand the causal patterns of factors that stimulate students' intention to continue studies in computer science (CS). To this end, it identifies gains and barriers as essential factors in CS education, including motivation and learning performance, and proposes a conceptual model along with research proposi...

Smart Cities have emerged as a global concept that argues for the effective exploitation of digital technologies to drive sustainable innovation and well-being for citizens. Despite the large investments being placed on Smart City infrastructure, however, there is still very scarce attention on the new learning approaches that will be needed for cu...

Project-based learning (PjBL) is a promising approach for supporting learning of computer programming by addressing the gap between the attainment of abstract knowledge and the application of this knowledge to authentic programming tasks. The World Wide Web has considerable potential to expand and improve PjBL environments. However, making implicit...

With many Learning Object Repositories (LORs) implemented and maintained independently from different organizations or communities, valuable Learning Objects (LOs) are scattered over different LORs and making it difficult for end-users (namely, instructional designers, teachers and students) to easily find and access them. A suggested solution towa...

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 “Op...

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...

The benefits of the flipped classroom (FC) model in students' learning are claimed in many recent studies. These benefits are typically accounted to the pedagogically efficient use of classroom time for engaging students in active learning. Although there are several relevant studies for the deployment of the FC model in Science, Technology, Engine...

Project-based learning (PjBL) has been increasingly used to connect abstract knowledge and authentic tasks in educational practice, including computer programming education. Despite its promising effects on improving learning in multiple aspects, PjBL remains a struggle due to its complexity. Completing an authentic programming project involves a c...

In the last years, the need for developing strategies, models and tools to manage competences clearly emerges in numerous scenarios. For instance, this emergence especially raises when it is required to realize effective recruiting platforms, decision support systems for human resource management, learning management systems and so on. This work pr...

Online labs (OLs) constitute digital educational tools which can have a significant role in supporting science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) teachers in their daily teaching practice. Designing STEM lessons supported by specific OLs is a challenging task and thus, it is useful for STEM teachers to be able to share their lesson pla...

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 behavior...

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 su...

Subject Ontologies represent conceptualizations of disciplinary domains in which concepts symbolize topics that are relevant for the considered domain and are associated each other by means of specific relations. Usually, these kind of lightweight ontologies are adopted in knowledge-based educational environments to enable semantic organization and...

In the field of Technology-enhanced Learning (TeL), social tagging has been applied to Learning Object Repositories (LORs) mainly as a means:(a) to offer an alternative way of classifying the Learning Objects (LOs) based on the tag vocabulary created by the end-users of the LOs, and (b) to facilitate the enhancement of LOs’ descriptions via collabo...

Co-tagging refers to the process of adding the same tag to one or more digital resources by two or more taggers. This process can be modelled as a social network, also known as co-tagging network, where the actors are the taggers and the relationships between them are the common tags that they have used. Co-tagging networks have been studied by app...

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 tri...

It is reasonable to ask whether and to what extent digital technologies have had an impact on teaching, learning, and educational leadership. The CELDA (Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age) conferences have been exploring that question for the last dozen years. Looking back, one finds most papers aimed at the lesson and course lev...

Smart learning has become a new term to describe technological and social developments (e.g., Big and Open Data, Internet of Things, RFID, and NFC) enable effective, efficient, engaging and personalized learning. Collecting and combining learning analytics coming from different channels can clearly provide valuable information in designing and deve...

Digital systems and digital technologies are globally investigated for their potential to transform learning, teaching and assessment towards offering unique learning experiences to the twenty-first century learners. This Special Issue on Digital systems supporting cognition and exploratory learning in twenty-first century aims to contribute to the...

The International Workshop of Smart Environments and Analytics on Video-Based Learning (SE@VBL) aims to connect research efforts on Video-Based Learning with Smart Environments and Analytics to create synergies between these fields. The main objective is to build a research community around the intersection of these topical areas. In particular, SE...

Inclusive education, namely the process of providing all learners with equal educational opportunities, is a major challenge for many educational systems worldwide. In order to address this issue, a widely used framework has been developed, namely the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which aims to provide specific educational design guidelines...

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 holistic...

This book makes a contribution to a global conversation about the competencies, challenges, and changes being introduced as a result of digital technologies. This volume consists of four parts, with the first being elaborated from each of the featured panelists at CELDA (Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age) 2014. Part One is an i...

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 meso layer of the organization and is addr...

In order to enable and support lifelong learning, learners need to be aware of their learning processes. This work proposes a framework for supporting Self-regulation in Seamless Learning scenarios. The framework is based on the Endsley's Model for Situation Awareness. Moreover, the framework is contextualised to a specific class of learning scenar...

Popularity of massive online open courses (MOOCs) allowed educational researchers to address problems which were not accessible few years ago. Although classical statistical techniques still apply, large datasets allow us to discover deeper patterns and to provide more accurate predictions of student's behaviors and outcomes. The goal of this tutor...

Recommender Systems (RS) have been implemented in the Technology enhanced Learning (TeL) field for facilitating, among others, Learning Object (LO) selection by teachers to support their daily teaching practice. In particular, memory-based collaborative filtering (CF) approaches have demonstrated promising results for real-life implementations of w...

Remote and virtual labs (RVLs) are widely used by science education teachers in their daily teaching practice. This has led to a plethora of RVLs that are offered with or without cost. In order to organise them and facilitate their search and findability, several RVL web-based repositories have been operated. As a result, a key open challenge is to...