New ideas have entered education with the growing use of technology in schools. One of these ideas is datafication, which means the collection and use of student data through digital platforms in education. Datafication creates several challenges, such as limited transparency, risks to inclusion, and reduced autonomy for teachers when making decisions. Another important challenge concerns teachers' skills: how they can develop the digital competences needed to keep up with new tools in education. Reliable evidence is urgently needed, as both policymakers and teachers must understand the opportunities and risks of these developments before making informed decisions.

Education is one of the most noticeable sectors affected by datafication as, apart from transforming the ways in which teaching and learning are organised, it also impacts the ways in which future generations construct reality with and through data. Datafication implies the collection of data at all levels of educational systems (individual, classroom, school, international, national and regional), potentially about all processes of teaching, learning and school management. This proliferation of data changes decision-making and opinion-forming processes of educational stakeholders and impacts education policy, school supervision, school authorities, teachers, students and parents.

Evidence from research acknowledge the benefits of educational data literacy as a core competence for all education professionals, including schoolteachers, instructional designers and tutors of online and blended learning courses, as well as educational institution leaders. To date, school organisations, leaders and teachers are challenged with reinventing their teaching and learning environments to offer higher-quality, more accessible and inclusive teaching, learning and assessment beyond the periods of emergency education. Today, data-literate educators must interpret the education data in a meaningful manner and translate these data into actions that inform instruction, improve teaching and learning. Similarly, data-literate education leaders must adopt a data-driven evidence-analysis perspective to improve the overall school performance. 

According to the latest European Schoolnet Perspectives Paper, at individual level, adaptive learning technologies or digital personalised learning (DPL) can personalise content according to student or teacher needs. At group or system level, student data collected through these tools can be aggregated and analysed by researchers, policymakers and digital tool developers to make evidence-based decisions. However, international reports and the research literature highlight a range of challenges to making the use of data beneficial for students.

Datafication also creates several challenges, such as limited transparency, risks to inclusion, and reduced autonomy for teachers when making decisions. Another important challenge concerns teachers' skills: how they can develop the digital competences needed to keep up with new tools in education. For this reason, reliable evidence, collaboration among academia, policymakers, EdTech providers and educators is crucial, as both policymakers and teachers must understand the opportunities and risks of these developments before making informed decisions. This topic is one of the key priorities of European Schoolnet, which is working in collaboration with its network to offer evidence and best practices in the use of data in education.

Resources

European Schoolnet report on the collection of student data
9 January 2023
A report on the existing legislation and practices regarding the collection and use of student data in education – what is collected and for which purpose. As life becomes increasingly digital, so does education. Within this new reality, how is student data collected, stored, transferred, managed, protected and what is it used for?
 
European Schoolnet podcast: Playful learning, data literacy and wellbeing
18 February 2025
Playful learning is not a new idea. However, it has been on the rise in the recent years, perhaps as one counterbalance to the increasing performativity brought about by digitalisation and datafication in schools. In this episode,  we were joined by Vibeke Schrøder and Niels-Peder Osmundsen Hjøllund, lecturers and senior consultants at the University College Copenhagen.
 
Listen to the episode here:
 
 
European Schoolnet's YouTube playlist on data in education.
 

Expert views

Professor Demetrios Sampson is a Professor of Digital Systems for Learning and Education at the Department of Digital Systems, School of Information and Communication Technologies, University of Piraeus, Greece. 

In his keynote speech at the EMINENT event (Experts Meeting in Education Networking) in 2023, Prof. Demetrios Sampson discussed the benefits of educational data literacy as a core competence for all education professionals, including schoolteachers, instructional designers and tutors of online and blended learning courses, as well as educational institution leaders.

 

 

Projects

Agile EDU

The Agile EDU project, coordinated by European Schoolnet, aims to support inclusive and high-quality digital education as per the EC Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027.

The digitalisation of education has gone through a massive increase during the Covid-19 pandemic, one that showed the unpreparedness of different actors (school leaders, teachers, parents, students themselves, etc.) in meeting the challenges associated with this development.
 
The project's main outcomes will be presented in December 2025 including: The capacity to use and govern data supported at organisational and individual level through guidance for practitioners (teachers and other school staff) and recommendations with examples – including governance mechanisms - to improve strategies (school, local and central levels) for a responsible, purposeful, inclusive use of data.
 
 

EVIDALI - Evidence-Informed Data Literacy for Policy & Practice

The project focuses on both the policy and practice dimensions of data use in schools. It investigates how data is currently used by teachers and school leaders, identifies training needs, and supports policy makers in designing evidence-informed strategies.
 
To achieve its objectives, EVIDALI will carry out a mapping analysis of existing national strategies, implement the Data Literacy Survey in Schools, facilitate Policy Learning Labs involving policymakers and researchers, validate good practices through practitioner engagement, and develop a multilingual MOOC for teachers and trainers.
 

Events

EMINENT is the flagship annual conference of European Schoolnet. For the 2022 edition, high-level experts on digital education convened in Dublin to discuss how to foster a responsible and smart use of data in education, in response to the increasing impact of datafication in the classroom. Looking at data from AI in education, Prof. Dr. Dagmar Monett-Díaz, Division Director Computer Science Berlin School of Economics and Law, explained:
"The future of AI in education could be bright if we pay careful attention to how, for what, by whom and for whom AI is used."