411 REFERENCE · Wikibooks
Open Education Handbook/Types of Open Data
Reference material by Wikibooks contributors. This retains its source identity and is not 411 news reporting.
There are many different types of data that can be relevant to education and come from education. Relevant sources might include:
Publications & literature: ACM, PubMed, DBLP (L3S), OpenLibrary
Domain-specific knowledge & resources: Bioportal for Life Sciences,
historic artefacts in Europeana, Geonames
Cross-domain knowledge: Wikidata, DBpedia, Freebase, ...
(Social) media resource metadata: BBC, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, ...
Explicitly educational datasets and schemas include:
University Linked Data: eg. The Open University UK, , Southampton University, University of Munster (DE), http://education.data.gov.uk
OER Linked Data: mEducator Linked ER, Open Learn LD
Schemas: Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), mEducator Educational Resources schema
Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK) Dataset
Vast Open Educational Resource (OER) & MOOC metadata collections (e.g. OpenCourseware, OpenLearn, Merlot, ARIADNE)
KIS data
Education GPS is the OECD source for internationally comparable data on education policies and practices, opportunities and outcomes. Accessible any time, in real time, the Education GPS provides you with the latest information on how countries are working to develop high-quality and equitable education systems.
There are also many different ways to categorise this data.
Student data: attendance, grades, skills, exams, homework
Course data: employability related to courses, curriculum, syllabus, VLE data, number of textbooks, skills, digital literacy…
Institution data: location data, success/failure rates, results, infrastructure, power consumption, location, student enrolment, textbook budget, teacher names and contracts, drop out rates, total cost of ownership, sponsorship, cost per pupil, graduation rates, male vs female, years in education, ratio of students to teaching staff
User-generated data: learning analytics, assessments, performance data, job placements, laptop data, time on tasks, use of different programmes/apps, web site data
Policy/Government data: equity, budgets, spending, UNESCO literacy data, deprivation and marginalisation in education, participation
In addition to information about open licensing, a more detailed description of an open data set may include:
Provenance
Reference (gov data, geo-data, etc.) - e.g. national curriculum
Location of schools, Unis etc
Core/Internal (course catalogue, course resources, staff data, buildings, etc.)
User-generated/contributed (user activities, assessments, etc.)
Granularity
individual/personal
aggregated/analytics
report
Descriptiveness
data streams (multimedia resources)
data content (textual content, database)
resource metadata
content metadata
paradata (as in metadata about data collection)
Content
Usage/activity data (paradata as in the learning analytics definition)
student personal info
student profiles (interest, demographics, etc.)
student trajectories
curriculum / learning objectives / learning outcomes
educational resources (multimedia or not)
resources metadata (including library collections, reading lists - see Talis Aspire)
assessment/grades
institutional performance (e.g., OFSTED, KIS)
resource outputs (publication repositories, etc.), research management data (projects and funding, etc.), research data
cost and student funding data, budgets and finances
Classifications/disciplines/topics (e.g. JACS)
Further resources
Call for more data on job placements of PhD students
Linked Universities
UK Department for Education: Open data strategy