Open education data on the European Data Portal

Open education data

Open education data can refer to open data produced by institutions focusing on education, such as schools and universities. Examples of these datasets are:

• Administrative data, including reference data such as the location of an academic institution and attendance information;
• Internal data, including staff names, available resources, budget, and personnel data;
• Curriculum data;
• Performance data, including the grades of students; and
• Jobs in academia.

These datasets are often analysed and incorporated into aggregate school reports and state and national statistics. In addition, they are of interest to a wide variety of stakeholders, such as government officials who want additional data to improve the education system, businesses who want to recruit new talent, researchers who are looking for additional or complementary data for their research, and parents researching schools.

This article showcases examples of open education data and uses cases harnessing education data.

Impact of open education data

The European Data Portal (EDP) offers over 9,000 datasets related to education. For example:

• 'Higher Education in Further Education Student Survey (HEIFES)' that provides estimates of higher education student numbers against recognised available higher education courses in the United Kingdom from the data.gov.uk.
• 'Datasets of Educational Resources for Teaching the History of Arts' in France, collected by le Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (Ministry of Culture and Communication) and available on the French Open Data Portal.
• 'Extra-curricular activity' that provides data on extracurricular activities in schools around Moldova, available on Government Open Data Portal Moldova.

These datasets are accessible on the EDP and were harvested from national open data portals across Europe.

Open data use case cases of open education data

The EDP has five examples of use cases that use open education data. For example, the platform School Information Map and the company Mime Consulting.

School Information Map is a free interactive Irish platform that enablers users to see the location of different schools across Ireland and to explore which schools offer facilities for special educational needs. The aim of this platform is to support partners in selecting a school for their children. School Information Map collects data from schools across Ireland, including its location, contact information, and the provided facilities at the school.

Mime Consulting is a consulting company based in the United Kingdom that allows users to explore education and training options, and to compare career options. By presenting users with this information, Mime Consulting enables users to see what skills and knowledge are on demand for jobs they are interested in and what education and training options to pursue. Mime Consulting collects data from data sources such as the municipality of London, which provides data on job demand and skill supply.

For more examples on open data, look at the EDP's datasets and use cases from different European countries! If you know of any open data use cases, share them with us via mail, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn to stay up to date!