Pathway to support the adoption of PBL in open data education

Abstract

Governments, public sector institutions and organisations have started releasing and sharing information in the format of open data (OD). The opportunities to create and innovate with OD will continue to grow, and there is an expectation that educational institutions will produce competitive graduates with OD skills. A key question arising from these expectations is how to equip the workforce and students with OD skills. Based on literature from education design and design fields and an empirical analysis of different OD training activities in five European countries, we identified a need to support OD teachers by developing a visual, structured and simple model to guide them through the adaption and implementation of PBL and foster their competences as learning designers, thus the paper proposes an OD–Problem-Based Learning (PBL) pathway model. The pathway model aims to guide educators by structuring the design process of OD training activities and promotes design skills among teachers. The pathway model comprises five main steps: understand, review, design, teach and reflect. Each step provides guidelines on how to plan an OD course.