The Highest Quality and GDPR-Compliant Teaching Tool Catalogue for Digital Teachers Erasmus Project

Project Title

The Highest Quality and GDPR-Compliant Teaching Tool Catalogue for Digital Teachers

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Open and distance learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

TEACHINGTOOLS brings together two worlds: the legal guidelines on data privacy and tools for digital education. Our goal is to unite EU GDPR legislation with high-quality digital tools that ensure that teachers can provide optimum educational experiences while ensuring the data privacy rights of individuals in the EU and EEA are protected. Spurred on by the closing of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of MOOCS, the ever-growing numbers of education apps and tools available, and companies’ appetites for user data, ensuring that this combination of judicial and pedagogical elements in online education is assured is becoming a more important issue every day. The EU GDPR was established in 2018, but many organisations are still unsure of how to tailor their products to these regulations and schools and teachers often are not familiar with the GDPR requirements. There is also no tool that evaluates GDPR compliancy for the entire EU and EEA.

To bring together these two important aspects (high-quality pedagogical tools and data protection), we will carry out 5 phases. The first phase is a research phase. Here we will examine what tools are currently available, what tools teachers are using, what tools teachers have available to them, and what tools they would like to have. Based on our findings, the next three phases will include the assembly of high-quality available tools that abide by EU GDPR law and embed them in a catalogue that is tailored to our target audience: teachers and schools. This tool and catalogue will be freely available and we will publish our research findings in open-access locations.

Our project will have an impact in many ways. Teachers will have the chance to voice their thoughts about digital tools and share their needs and wishes. Our project will present them with a variety of high-quality tools compliant with GDPR. The teacher-centricity of the catalogue will save teachers time and resources. Testing multiple digital tools for quality or data protection requirements will no longer be necessary as both teachers and schools will be able to trust the resources included in our catalogue and know that their data rights are protected and that they are supplying their students with quality materials. Teachers who before were hesitant to use digital tools and be unfamiliar with the options available may now be more open to trying out some of the excellent digital tools that are available. These beneficial tools will in turn impact students who will experience a more beneficial use of digital resources, enhancing their motivation, success, and participation.

In the long-term, we think that the catalogue and GDPR tools will continue to evolve and that we can expand our project to as many countries as possible. Our project will first be available in English, Norwegian, and Finnish, but ideally, more languages and countries will be included. We also think that our project will inspire digital resource creators to be more aware of quality standards and GDPR when developing their products so that everyone can be assured that educational resources are of high quality and comply with legal privacy requirements.

The three participating organisations are the Norwegian SME Pålogga, the Finnish SME Educational Alliance Finland (EAF), and the British SME GDPR in Schools (GDPRiS). Pålogga was set up in the wake of school closures in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It brought together teachers into a thriving online community and quickly grew to including over 60,000 members. EAF is an expert organisation specialising in quality verification of learning solutions. Product quality evaluations are done by trained teacher-evaluators who use an evaluation method developed by educational psychologists from the University of Helsinki. GDPRiS provides data protection monitoring and management software for the education sector. Almost 3,000 schools in the UK currently reply on their software to help them achieve compliance with the GDPR.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 99292 Eur

Project Coordinator

Pålogga AS & Country: NO

Project Partners

• Kokoa Agency Oy
• GDPR in Schools Limited