Riina Vuorikari

The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp) provides a common understanding of what digital competence is and can thus support curriculum planning, instruction and assessment both at EU level and in Member States. Additionally, a reference framework such as DigComp can be a tool to support policy-making and monitoring (e.g. setting targ...

Digital competence is crucial for living, working, and participating in current societies. Despite its huge importance, objective measurement tools for it are scarce due to its developmental difficulty. Self-assessment of digital competence seems a promising proxy of objective tests, and it additionally offers the possibility for surveying otherwis...

Digital competence is crucial for living, working and participating in current societies. Despite its huge importance, objective measurement tools for it are scarce due to its developmental difficulty. Self-assessment of digital competence seems a promising proxy of objective tests, and it additionally offers the possibility for surveying otherwise...

This report proposes a set of science-for-policy future directions for AI and child’s rights. It connects research and policy to gain insights by the interplay among different stakeholders and to go beyond the identification of ethical guidelines towards methods for practical future implementations. For the formulation of the proposed directions, w...

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...

This report maps the digital engagement of children aged between 6 and 12 years and the perceptions and practices of their parents, related to emergency remote schooling during and after the spring 2020 lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article outlines a secondary analysis of two European studies on innovative teacher professional development, through the lens of the Personal, Social and Learning to Learn European key competence. The 2018 European Recommendation describes it as being resilient, reflecting upon oneself, working with others, and managing time, information, lea...

This paper explores the relationship between students’ digital competence acquisition, teaching practices, and teacher professional learning activities. We analysed insights provided by 59,452 teachers through SELFIE, an online self-reflection tool for schools’ digital capacity. Using ordinary least squares regressions with school fixed effects, we...

Knowledge Working with us Procurement News & Events Our communities Knowledge Knowledge & competence centres Scientific tools & databases Publications Reference & measurement Patents & technologies Training Related topics Learning and Skills for the Digital Era How families handled emergency remote schooling during the Covid-19 lockdown in sprin...

Funding affects how science is carried out. Over the last 50 years, the core of science funding has become competitive, project based and increasingly oriented towards societal challenges. Recently, alternative, more open and flexible funding mechanisms have emerged, such as crowdfunding, philanthropy and bottom-up mechanisms. This chapter analyses...

Will today’s emerging technologies impact the teaching profession in the future? Which parts of the teaching tasks or learning processes could be substituted, enhanced and transformed through automatisation, algorithms and machines? To help educational stakeholders with strategic reflection and anticipatory thinking, eight future-oriented scenari...

Digital competence has become crucial for employability. A key challenge is for employees and job-seekers, who may not have experience or confidence with their digital skills yet the nature of their jobs, the sectors they work in and their lives are increasingly influenced by digitalisation. This report aims to provide some light to the question o...

Reference frameworks for digital competence create an agreed vision of what is needed in terms of competences to overcome the challenges that arise from digitization in almost all aspects of our lives. Examples at the global level are the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens1 by the European Commission and the United Nations Educational, Scien...

This report aims to shed light on some of the key drivers which are worth taking into account when assessing the effect of new technologies on the future of work and skills. It combines a synthesis of the most recent and robust scientific evidence available with original JRC research on issues which have been often overlooked by existing studies. I...

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. The report focuses on innovative and emergent practices of teacher...

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 analys...

This Guide supports stakeholders in the implementation of the European Digital Competence Framework (DigComp) through sharing of 38 existing inspiring practices of DigComp implementations. These are illustrated by 50 content items consisting of Case studies and Tools.The list of examples provided in the Guide’s annex is not exhaustive and aims to i...

The Travel well data set was collected on the Learning Resource Exchange portal that makes open educational resources available from 20 content providers in Europe and elsewhere. Most registered users are primary and secondary teachers who come from a variety of European countries. The data set contains data from the pilot phase which was conducted...

DigComp 2.1 is a further development of the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens. Based on the reference conceptual model published in DigComp 2.0, we present now 8 proficiency levels and examples of use applied to the learning and employment field.

Funding affects how science is carried out. Over the last 50 years, the core of science funding has become competitive, project based and increasingly oriented towards societal challenges. Recently, alternative, more open and flexible funding mechanisms have emerged, such as crowdfunding, philanthropy and bottom-up mechanisms. This chapter analyses...

Learning analytics is an emergent field of research that is growing fast. It takes advantage of the last decade of e-learning implementations n education and training as well as of research and development work in areas such as educational data mining, web analytics and statistics. In recent years, increasing numbers of digital tools for the educat...

DigComp 2.0: The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens. The European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens, also known as DigComp, offers a tool to improve citizens’ digital competence. DigComp was first published in 2013 and has become a reference for many digital competence initiatives at both European and Member State levels. This docume...

The European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens, also known as DigComp, offers a tool to improve citizens’ digital competence. DigComp was first published in 2013 and has become a reference for many digital competence initiatives at both European and Member State levels. This document introduces DigComp 2.0. It constitutes phase 1 of the up...

The aim of this study was to make an inventory of the existing cases in formal education (school sector, vocational education and higher education) where a curriculum or syllabus is shared across borders (e.g. state, national, linguistic and cultural). Based on the analysis of the desk research and a case study, further considerations was given to...

The aim of this research is to look at the key elements that help sustain and scale up a European-wide teacher network called eTwinning. eTwinning, which has more than 250,000 European teachers as members in April 2014, has become an incubator for pedagogical innovation in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for cross-border...

This report covers the outcomes of two studies funded by JRC IPTS to explore emerging drivers for Open Science 2.0. In general, Open Science 2.0 is associated with themes such as open access to scientific outputs, open data, citizen science and open peer evaluation systems. This study, however, focused on less explored themes, namely on alternative...

The NMC Horizon Project from the New Media Consortium is a long-term investigation launched in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in education around the globe. The NMC Horizon Report Europe: 2014 Schools Edition, the first of its kind for Europe, examines six key trends...

Adult learning and open education have become key elements on the European Agenda. This paper presents the first results of a foresight activity that aims to contribute to an understanding of how ‘Opening up Education’ can improve adult learning in Europe in the future. It argues that to open up adult learning two main challenges must be overcome:...

The potential benefits of OER have led many European governments to implement policies supporting their creation and use. This chapter aims to put these OER policies in context, discussing their focus and scope and highlighting challenges and bottlenecks. On the basis of the analysis of the current state of the art, it is argued that one of main ba...

The aim of the paper is to present and compare so-called bottom-up and top-down approaches for evaluating quality and reusability of learning objects (LOs). The paper proposes bottom-up methodology that outlines the central role of learners' individual and social behaviour while working with LOs. This includes social tagging and some parameters of...

Teacher networks, i.e. communities to share and co-construct professional knowledge, are touted to be important for teachers' continuous professional development. Especially social networks and online communities can offer opportunities anywhere, anytime and at a relatively low cost as compared to on-site training. In this paper we present a concep...

Many scholars have contributed efforts to improve education in schools. A major motivation for learning scientists to develop design research as a methodology is to contribute to theory and educational practice through rigorous research without avoiding the complexities and messiness in authentic educational settings. There are many examples of suc...

A growing interest in research focuses on teachers’ large-scale socio-technical networks. Social learning approaches such as social constructivist theory is well established, however, the current challenges lie in creating reliable methods to gather evidence of how and under which conditions social learning takes place in such socio-technical netwo...

Technology Enhanced Learning is undergoing a significant shift in paradigm towards more data driven systems that will make educational systems more transparent and predictable. Data science and data-driven tools will change the evaluation of educational practice and didactical interventions for individual learners and educational institutions. We s...

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 commu...

In this paper we first investigate how eTwinning and national and local teachers' professional development schemes interact. eTwinning is the community for schools in Europe that promotes teacher and school collaboration through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) under the European Union's Lifelong Learning Programme. The e...

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is therefore an application domain that generally covers technologies that support all forms of teaching and learning activities. Since information retrieval (in t...

We investigate how eTwinning, the community for schools in Europe that promotes teacher and school collaboration through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), has grown in its first five years. eTwinning currently attracts over 130'000 teachers in Europe who can be identified as "innovators" in using ICTs in cross-border scho...

In the world of recommender systems, it is a common practice to use public available datasets from different application environments (e.g. MovieLens, Book-Crossing, or Each-Movie) in order to evaluate recommendation algorithms. These datasets are used as benchmarks to develop new recommendation algorithms and to compare them to other algorithms in...

The workshop was motivated by the issue that very less educational datasets are publicly available in TEL, so that the outcomes of different TEL adaptive applications and recommender systems that support personalised learning are hardly comparable. In other domains like in e-commerce it is a common practise to use different datasets as benchmarks t...

Drachsler, H., Bogers, T., Vuorikari, R., Verbert, K., Duval, E., Manouselis, N., Beham, G., Lindstaedt, S., Stern, H., Friedrich, M., & Wolpers, M. (2010). Issues and considerations regarding sharable data sets for recommender systems in technology enhanced learning. In N. Manouselis, H. Drachsler, K. Verbert, & O. Santos (Eds.), Elsevier Procedia...

Repositories with educational resources can support the formation of online learning communities by providing a platform for collaboration. Users (e.g. teachers, tutors and learners) access repositories, search for interesting resources to access and use, and in many cases, also exchange experiences and opinions. A particular class of online servic...

Web-based tagging systems for educational resources allow users to associate free keywords with learning resources. We first focus on the similarities and differences of tagging systems that are an integrated part of learning resources platforms, and then introduce a case study on teachers use of social tagging tools. We then analyse more than 20 0...

Fetter, S., & Vuorikari, R. (2010, 6 February). Tools to support eTwinning interactions. Presentation of a workshop at the eTwinning Conference 2010, Sevilla, Spain: European Schoolnet, Open University of the Netherlands, Tellnet.

In this study an investigation using log-files of teachers’ Collections of educational resources in two different platforms was conducted. The goal was to find empirical evidence from the field that teachers use and reuse learning resources that are in a language other than their mother tongue and originate from different countries than they do, fo...

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.

School networking is increasingly important in a globalised world, where schools themselves can be actors on an international stage. This article builds on the activities and experience of the longest established European initiative in this area, European Schoolnet (EUN), a network of 31 Ministries of Education. First, we offer an introduction cove...

Social networks make an essential contribution to knowledge sharing in our fast moving and changing world. However, it is difficult to apply new techniques to the complex, firm and Europe-wide differing educational systems. And this process for technology enhanced learning is still evolving and challenging. This paper presents the research results...

In order to exploit usage and attention metadata, one needs to define what properties of usage to use and why, second, how to gather data on that property, and third, what to do with that information. In this paper, we propose to consider usage and attention metadata as an example of the wider notion of context and give an overview of dimensions of...

Purpose This paper deals with user‐generated interest indicators (ratings, bookmarks and tags). The authors aim to answer two research questions: Can search strategies based on social information retrieval (SIR) make the discovery of learning resources more efficient for users? Can Community search help users discover a wider variety of cross‐bound...

This paper discusses the rationale for the representation of user feedback in a structured and reusable format so that it can be reused by different recommender systems. We emphasize how information about the context can be included in such a representation. This work-in-progress takes place in the context of two large European initiatives that set...

In this study, over a period of six months, we gathered empirical data from more than 200 users on a learning resource portal with a social bookmarking and tagging feature. Our aim was to study the interrelation of conventional metadata and social tags on the one hand, and their interaction with the environment, which can be understood as the repos...

This paper examines the case of developing a learning resources collaborative filtering service for an online community of teachers in Europe. A data set of multi-attribute evaluations of learning resources has been collected from the teachers who used European Schoolnet's CELEBRATE portal. Using this data set as input, a candidate multi-attribute...

Abstract. In this study, over a period of six months, we gathered empirical data from more than 200 users on a learning resource portal with a social bookmarking and tagging feature. Our aim was to study the interrelation of conventional metadata and social tags on the one hand, and their interaction with the environment, which can be understood as...

Summary This paper reports on the experiences of the first large scale effort to share educational resources for schools in Europe. As such it does not address authoring or the use of learning resources, but provides experiences of interest to any organisation wishing to act as an educational content broker, matching supply with demand. Even though...

Vuorikari, R., & Koper, R. (2009). Tags and self-organisation in a multilingual educational context. In R. Vuorikari, H. Drachsler, N. Manouselis & R. Koper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning ‘SIRTEL09’. August, 21, 2009, Aachen, Germany: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, online http://...

This paper offers an excerpt of a chapter that will appear later in the First Hand-book on Recommender Systems. It focuses on the field of Technology enhanced learning (TEL) that aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisa-tions. TEL is therefore an applic...

Although social, collaborative classification through tagging has been the focus of recent research, the effect of multi-linguality is often overlooked. This work presents an exploratory study of the production and use of tags in multiple languages in a context of European Learning Resources Exchange. We describe a tagging tool used by teachers fro...

This chapter provides an overview into policies in the area of e-learning that ten European countries, all members of European Schoolnet, have taken regarding open content and free and open source software (FOSS) to be used to support and enhance learning. Additionally, it elaborates on European Schoolnet’s initiatives to support open learning reso...

Web-based tagging systems for educational resources allow users to associate freekeyword with resources to facilitate their retrieval and reuse This paper looks at the similarities and differences among three different systems We first focus on the purpose of tagging and the incentives for users to tag educational resources. Then, we compare the mo...

Learning objects are systematically organised and classified in online databases, which are termed learning object repositories (LORs). Currently, a rich variety of LORs is operating online, offering access to wide collections of learning objects. These LORs cover various educational levels and topics, and are developed by using a variety of differ...

This paper gives an extended abstract of the dissertation work seeking to find how social information retrieval can enhance the discovery and reuse of digital educational content. A social bookmarking and tagging tool, that is used in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural context of Europe, is introduced to teachers. We intend to use this information...

Social information retrieval systems, such as recommender systems, would benefit from sharable and reusable evaluations of online resources. For example, in distributed repositories with rich collections of learning resources, users may benefit from evaluations (ratings, reviews, annotations, etc.) that previous users have provided. Moreover, shari...

In this paper, we describe the first steps of the content enrichment approach that European Schoolnet, with its partners in the MELT project, has taken to allow users collaboratively annotate the existing learning resources. The paper will briefly outline the MELT strategy for co-existence of structured and unstructured learning resources metadata...

Although social, collaborative classification through tagging has been the focus of recent research, the effect of multilingual tags is often overlooked. This work presents an early exploratory study of the production and consumption of multilingual tags in a European educational K-12 context. The data, produced by teachers bookmarking and tagging...

Learning objects are systematically organised and classified in online databases, which are termed learning object repositories (LORs). Currently, a rich variety of LORs is operating online, offering access to wide collections of learning objects. These LORs cover various educational levels and topics, and are developed by using a variety of differ...

Learning objects are systematically organised and classified in online databases, which are termed learning object repositories (LORs). Currently, a rich variety of LORs is operating online, offering access to wide collections of learning objects. These LORs cover various educational levels and topics, and are developed by using a variety of differ...

Social software is used widely in organizational knowledge management and professional learning. The PROLEARN network of excellence appreciates the trend of lowering the barriers between knowledge and learning management strategies for organizations and individuals. But, companies should not underestimate the needs for systematic support based on s...

This chapter provides an overview into policies in the area of e-learning that ten European countries, all members of European Schoolnet, have taken regarding open content and free and open source software (FOSS) to be used to support and enhance learning. Additionally, it elaborates on European Schoolnet's initiatives to support open learning reso...

To better understand the complex question of quality of web-based learning resources it is beneficial to look at the different processes during the life of a learning resource; what are the aspects of quality that are related to the creation of material, its discovery and eventually its use and re-use for learning purposes. Obviously this involves...

The challenge of finding appropriate learning objects is one of the bottlenecks for end users in Learning Object Repositories (LORs). This paper investigates usability problems of search tools for learning objects. We present findings and recommendations of an iterative usability study conducted to examine the usability of a search tool used to fin...

Vuorikari, R., Drachsler, H., Manouselis, N., & Koper, R. (Eds.) (2009). Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on SIRTEL’09. August, 21, 2009, Aachen, Germany: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, online http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-535/