1

A holistic approach for managing School ICT Competence Profiles

towards supporting school ICT uptake

Stylianos Sergis1,2, Panagiotis Zervas1,2 and Demetrios G. Sampson1,2

1Department of Digital Systems

University of Piraeus

Piraeus, Greece

2Information Technologies Institute

Centre for Research and Technology Hellas

Thessaloniki, Greece

e-mail: steliossergis@iti.gr, pzervas@iti.gr, sampson@unipi.gr

Abstract. Globally, large-scale national initiatives are being implemented towards promot-

ing the level and quality of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) use in school

education. However, despite these efforts, the current level of ICT uptake from schools re-

mains low. A wide range of factors have been identified as barriers, including lack of teach-

ers' ICT Competences and lack of ICT infrastructure. Typically, these barriers are tackled

separately without taking into consideration the ecosystemic nature of schools as organiza-

tions. In this paper we introduce a holistic approach on School ICT Competence based on

combining both individual teachers' ICT Competences and schools' eMaturity. Furthermore,

we present the design of a web-based School ICT Competence Management System which

aims to capture and monitor schools' overall level of ICT uptake and facilitate effective man-

agement of resources and strategic planning towards improvement, by jointly processing

these data.

Keywords: School ICT Competence, Teacher ICT Competence, eMaturity, ICT Uptake, Rec-

ommender Systems

1. Introduction

In all European countries, national policies for promoting the use of Information and Com-

munication Technologies (ICT) in school education exist and many initiatives are undertaken

to enhance the level and quality of ICT uptake in school education (Eurydice, 2011). The rea-

2

son for this is the anticipated benefits associated with technology-supported teaching and

learning (European Commission, 2012). Nevertheless, despite these encouraging findings,

the current level of ICT uptake from schools across Europe is low (European Commission,

2010). Moreover, this inconsistency exists despite the recurrent attempts to overcome it, in

the form of investments in ICT infrastructure (Durando et al., 2007; European Commission,

2013a), policy adjustments (European Commission / EACEA / Eurydice, 2012), and new par-

adigms in professional learning processes (Duncan-Howell, 2010; European Commission,

2013b).

The reasons for the abovementioned inconsistency are complex and are closely related to

the ecosystemic nature of schools as organizations (Solar et al., 2013). In this view, schools

are regarded as composite "organisms" comprising a wide range of actors and resources

that co-operate within their physical premises and beyond. Moreover, each of these actors

has its own unique contribution to the performance of the overall structure (Zhao & Frank,

2003). More specifically, these actors can include school teachers and their ICT Competenc-

es (Sang et al., 2010), ICT infrastructure of the school (Pelgrum, 2008) or purely managerial

matters, such as school funding policy (Nachmias et al., 2004) and ICT strategy planning

(Law & Chow, 2008). Therefore, these unique factors should be effectively captured and

evaluated both in their own regard, as well as from a system's perspective, for capturing

their manner of interconnection towards more informed strategic planning of schools.

In our previous work (Sergis & Sampson, 2014a), the concept of School ICT Competence was

introduced and aimed to pinpoint this plethora of interrelated factors influencing the level

of ICT uptake of schools, along with a manner to describe their unique contributions. For the

context of this paper, School ICT Competence Profiles will conceptually comprise two levels,

namely the teachers' ICT Competence Profiles and the schools' level of eMaturity (Durando

et al., 2007). The former relates to the specific ICT Competences of the individual teachers

employed in each school, while the latter involves metrics for measuring the level of ICT up-

take in a diverse set of school functions areas (e.g., teaching processes and infrastructure).

Thus, this paper contributes to the field of digital literacy and digital competence by intro-

ducing a holistic approach on School ICT Competence based on combining both individual

teachers' ICT Competences and schools' eMaturity. This holistic approach aims to address

identified shortcomings in the school leadership literature (Davis, 2008; Dexter, 2008),

3

namely the over-simplified existing standpoints about the ecosystemic nature of schools as

organizations.

In the light of the abovementioned proliferation of the issues contributing to the level of

school ICT uptake and related to the wide range of constituent parts of school ecosystems, a

need is identified for systems that will facilitate schools in performing relevant holistic moni-

toring and managing tasks (Neuhauser, 2004). More specifically, the added value of the re-

quired systems would have to relate to mechanisms that will not only capture the elements

of the School ICT Competence Profile, but will also meaningfully interpret and exploit these

data in a unifying manner, towards informed decision making to support effective school

management and strategic leadership.

Currently, however, no systems that approach the matter of capturing schools’ ICT Compe-

tence management from this holistic perspective have been proposed or implemented

(Põldoja et al., 2014). Therefore, the contribution of this paper is a step towards addressing

this issue, by presenting the design of a web-based School ICT Competence Management

System. The added value of the proposed system refers to the enhanced functionalities it

can offer for (a) capturing and monitoring both levels of schools’ ICT Competence Profile,

i.e. the level of teachers' ICT Competences and schools' level of eMaturity and (b) combining

these (previously) isolated data towards performing automatic diagnoses and generating

informed recommendations. These functionalities will potentially assist schools in delineat-

ing focused correctional paths and will guide their strategic planning towards organizational

improvement (Zangiski et al., 2013).

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the background of

the work and the processes employed for selecting the most appropriate frameworks for

depicting the schools' ICT Competence elements, i.e. the teachers' ICT Competences and the

schools' level of eMaturity. Moreover, the rationale for the proposed system is presented in

detail. Section 3 presents the design of the proposed School ICT Competence Management

System, i.e. the system architecture and core functionalities. Finally, Section 4 discusses the

conclusions of the paper and presents the future work in this field.

2. Background

4

2.1 Teacher ICT Competence

Individual Competences are a key concept in the areas of human resource management,

lifelong learning and performance management (García-Barriocanal et al. 2012; Tripathi &

Ranjan, 2013). A competence is defined as: “a set of knowledge, skills and attitudes that an

individual possess or needs to acquire, in order to perform an activity within a specific con-

text. Performance may range from the basic level of proficiency to the highest levels of excel-

lence” (Sampson & Fytros, 2008).

Apart from the identification of the three main constituents of competence (knowledge,

skills and attitudes) and their span in a continuum of proficiency level, this definition high-

lights a key factor that greatly affects the other two, i.e. the context in which the compe-

tence is being performed and assessed. The definition of context that this work adopts is

"the particular situation in which a practitioner is required to operate" (Cheetham & Chivers,

1998: 273). This notion of context is considered vital, since the level of proficiency of a spe-

cific competence is highly dependent on the context in which it is used (Cheetham & Chiv-

ers, 2005; Wesselink & Wals, 2011). Moreover, competences themselves differ when per-

formed in different contexts, since the required knowledge, skills or attitudes of the individ-

ual are shifted to meet the new requirements of the changing context (Delamare Le Deist &

Winterton, 2005). In the specific case of (face-to-face) Technology enhanced Learning (TeL),

context can be materialized as the school environment. Therefore, teachers' ICT compe-

tences, which are regarded as a key factor for the level of ICT uptake of the whole school,

are in turn, greatly affected by the overall school contextual affordances (Sang et al., 2010).

Teachers' ICT competences include (among others) both basic ICT skills, as well as the capac-

ity to utilize these skills in a pedagogically-appropriate manner (Goktas et al., 2013). To-

wards describing the full range of this set of required competences that teachers' should

possess in order to be effective in their practice, specific frameworks have been proposed. A

review of the relevant literature, presented in previous work (Zervas et al., 2014), pinpoint-

ed a set of five teacher ICT Competence Frameworks. These include the eLearning Compe-

tency Framework for Teachers and Trainers (EIfEL) (European Institute for e-Learning, 2008),

the eTQF Teacher ICT Competency Framework (eTQF) (eTQF, 2010), the UNESCO ICT Com-

5

petency Framework for Teachers (ICT-CFT) (UNESCO, 2011), the Tanzanian ICT Competency

Framework for Teachers (T- ICT-CFT) (Hooker et al., 2011) and the Competency Framework

– Computing and Internet Certificate for Teachers (CF-CICT) (French Ministry of Higher Edu-

cation and Research, 2012).

An analysis of the above frameworks was performed based on a set of criteria comprising

(a) competence granularity level, (b) framework region coverage and (c) competence de-

scription analysis, towards identifying the most appropriate framework for depicting the ICT

Competences of Teachers in the European TeL landscape. An overview of this analysis is de-

scribed in Table 1.

Based on the information presented in Table 1, the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for

teachers presents the highest cardinality of the set of sub-competences, which is an indica-

tor of high granularity in competence description. Furthermore, the ICT-CFT has an interna-

tional level of region coverage which results to its capacity to be adapted to accommodate

local regional educational needs. Finally, based on a content analysis of the competence de-

scriptions from all candidate ICT competence frameworks, the ICT-CFT boasts a full accom-

modation of the competence-related information provided by all the other competence

frameworks. The above analysis is presented in detail in (Zervas et al., 2014).

6

Table 1: Overview of Existing Teachers’ ICT Competence Frameworks

Competence Frame-

work

Year Region Cov-

erage

Categories Proficiency

Levels

Competences Sub-

Competences

eLearning Competen-

cy Framework for

Teachers and Train-

ers

2008 Regional

(Europe) 6 6 17 47

eTQF Teacher ICT

Competency Frame-

work

2010 Regional

(Europe) 4 4 52 -

UNESCO ICT Compe-

tency Framework for

Teachers

2011 International 6 3 18 61

Tanzanian ICT Com-

petency Framework

for Teachers

2011 Local

(Tanzania) 6 4 108 -

French Competency

Framework - Compu-

ting and Internet Cer-

tificate for Teachers

2012 Local

(France) 2 5 28 -

Moreover, the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers addresses all aspects of

teachers' practice and aims to provide with a comprehensive standard for assisting them in

successfully addressing all relevant dimensions of their work (UNESCO, 2011). The compe-

tences described in the ICT-CFT span from basic ICT skills and the capacity to utilize digital

educational tools in a pedagogically appropriate manner, to meta-cognitive competences

related to self-regulated professional development. It comprises 6 categories of ICT Compe-

tences, namely "Understanding ICT In Education", "Curriculum & Assessment", "Pedagogy",

"ICT", "Organization and Administration" and "Teacher Professional Development", spanning

3 proficiency levels, namely "Technology Literacy", "Knowledge Deepening" and "Knowledge

Creation". Each combination of competence category and proficiency level (18 combina-

tions) focuses on a different dimension of teachers' ICT Competences (Table 2).

7

Table 2: Overview of the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers

UNESCO ICT

Competence Categories Technology Literacy Knowledge Deepening Knowledge Creation

Understanding ICT In Education Policy awareness Policy understanding Policy innovation

Curriculum &Assessment Basic Knowledge Knowledge Application Knowledge society skills

Pedagogy Integrate Technology Complex Problem Solving Self Management

ICT Basic Tools Complex Tools Pervasive Tools

Organization and Administration Standard Classroom Collaborative Groups Learning Organizations

Teacher Professional Develop-

ment Digital Literacy Manage and Guide Teacher as Model Learner

For all the aforementioned reasons, the ICT-CFT has been adopted in the proposed School

ICT Competence Management System for depicting the ICT Competences of the school

teachers.

2.2 School eMaturity

The second level of the School ICT Competence structure includes the level of eMaturity of

the school in its diverse function areas. It is a concept that (in the educational domain) ad-

dresses the level and quality of ICT use in schools, in terms of educational outcome im-

provement (BECTA, 2002). Currently, there are two prevailing definitions of eMaturity in the

literature, each with its own focal standpoint. Underwood et al. (2010) define eMaturity as

the "organizational readiness to deal with e-learning and the degree to which this is embed-

ded in the curriculum". On the other hand, Durando et al. (2007) propose that eMaturity is

the "strategic and effective use of ICT to improve educational outcomes". Both definitions

argue for a systematic exploitation of the potential of ICT, intertwined with the school pro-

cesses and needs (Micheuz, 2009).

Previous work (Sergis & Sampson, 2014a; 2014b) has revealed a set of five existing frame-

works for the measurement of the level of eMaturity of schools. These were the NAACE ICT-

Mark (NAACE, 2014), the Digital Schools Award (Digital Schools of Distinction, 2013), the

P2P/P2V Inspectorates Framework (European Schoolnet, 2009), the ACODE Benchmarks

(ACODE, 2014) and the E-Learning Maturity Model (eMM) (Marshall, 2007).

8

Towards selecting the most appropriate for incorporation in the proposed School ICT Com-

petence Management System, an evaluation of the identified frameworks was performed

against a set of generic eMaturity criteria. These criteria are described in Sergis & Sampson

(2014a; 2014b) and are similar to eMaturity criteria proposed by Luger (2007), Davies & Pit-

tard (2009) and Harrison et al. (2014). The evaluation results are depicted in Table 3. As Ta-

ble 3 depicts, most eMaturity frameworks do not fully accommodate the identified universal

eMaturity meta-categories. More specifically, the P2P lacks explicit representation of two

such categories and presents a low level of granularity for its existing metrics, due to the

manner in which they are being assessed. The latter includes the incorporation of a signifi-

cant number of performance indicators within each metric, therefore limiting the capacity

to infer information for each one of them separately.

Table 3: Evaluation of existing eMaturity frameworks

Leadership

for ICT

Curriculum

planning for ICT

integration

ICT

Support

ICT

Professional

Development

ICT in Learn-

ing And

Teaching Pro-

cesses

Resources / In-

frastructure

NAACE

ICT-MARK

Digital

Schools

Award

P2P

ACODE

eMM

The Digital Schools Award also presents a lack of explicit accommodation of key eMaturity

categories. Despite the fact that most of the metrics in the categories that are not being ex-

plicitly accommodated have been embedded within others, this shortcoming leads to a low

level of eMaturity description granularity.

9

The ACODE and the eMM frameworks both present detailed metrics for measuring the level

of ICT uptake of educational institutions. However, they both lack explicit accommodation

of certain eMaturity categories, which are embedded within other described categories. In

the same vein as the Digital School Award, this can pose a significant shortcoming for deci-

sion makers, since no specific information can be drawn for the level of the school’s perfor-

mance in these eMaturity categories.

Finally, the NAACE ICT-MARK explicitly accommodates all identified eMaturity meta-

categories. Furthermore, it offers a large number of metrics and incorporates performance

indicators for all candidate assessment options, therefore assisting the process of self-

evaluation for schools. Due to these reasons, the NAACE ICT-MARK was selected as the most

appropriate eMaturity framework for the proposed School ICT Competence Management

System.

2.3 Combining Teachers' ICT Competence and Schools' eMaturity: School ICT Competence

In the two previous sections, the most appropriate frameworks for capturing and describing

each of the two levels of School ICT Competence were selected, i.e. the teachers' ICT Com-

petences and the schools' level of eMaturity. However, a core finding that emerged from

these analyses was the lack of a unified approach for effectively considering both levels and

their interconnections towards more informed school strategic planning. More specifically,

all existing eMaturity frameworks suffer from a lack of adequate accommodation of the in-

dividual teachers' ICT competences (Sergis & Sampson, 2014a) and how the latter are affect-

ing the overall school performance. Similarly, the teachers' ICT Competence frameworks do

not incorporate contextual (school) factors in their definition of ICT competences and how

these affect (or are affected by) the ICT Competences described in the framework, therefore

providing a "blue-sky" view of the teachers' competence requirements at a European level.

Therefore, it becomes evident that the two previously isolated School ICT Competence lev-

els should be jointly considered and processed towards more informed strategic school

planning and leadership. This has been raised as an important challenge for tackling the is-

sue of low level of ICT uptake at a European level (Solar et al., 2013). More specifically, it

could provide with the added value of not only monitoring the schools' overall performance

in the identified key function areas (as these are described by the school eMaturity frame-

10

work adopted), but gaining granulated insight on the factors that lead to these performance

levels (i.e., the competences of the individual faculty performing the relevant processes).

For example, an existing eMaturity framework would highlight a low level of school eMa-

turity in the manner in which the existing ICT infrastructure is being exploited for building

the learners’ competences to investigate and solve problems. However, without an explicit

ICT competence profiling of the teachers responsible for planning and delivering the cours-

es, it would not be possible to link this problem to the lack of teachers’ specific set of com-

petences. Moreover, this detailed profiling would allow for the identification of the specific

teachers that lack the necessary competences, and thus impede the overall processes and

school-wide strategies. By exploiting this extra level of information, the school leader can

delineate focused correctional actions, e.g. organize targeted professional development ac-

tivities for the teachers with the low-level ICT Competences or, even, identify other teachers

within (or beyond) the school that possess the required ICT Competence Profile.

Nevertheless, performing these tasks, and more significantly, planning the paths to remedy,

is a time-consuming and difficult endeavor. The complexity involved becomes more over-

whelming considering the lack of existing tools for facilitating these processes and generat-

ing informed recommendations on school-wide level, based on the combination of available

data.

In the light of the above, the contribution of this paper is to present the design of a web

based system that aims to tackle these shortcomings. More specifically, the paper presents

the design architecture and the core functionalities of a School ICT Competence Manage-

ment System. The added value of this system, apart from the fact that no similar systems

have been implemented, is divided in three conceptual Modules, namely the Diagnostic

Module, the Recommendation Module and the Remedy Module, as follows.

The Diagnostic Module. This module includes mechanisms for capturing and visualiz-

ing the teachers' ICT Competence Profiles and the schools' eMaturity level. The re-

trieved data are utilized for diagnostic purposes, i.e. for processing and visually de-

picting the current level of the School ICT Competence profile. This has the potential

to assist school teachers and school leaders have a detailed overview of their own

11

and their schools' level of ICT Competence and initially plan for improvement in the

areas identified as underperforming.

The Recommendation Module. This module includes the mechanisms that translate

the generated diagnostic data to targeted recommendations for strategic school

planning. More specifically, these mechanisms include personalized professional de-

velopment opportunities for the teachers showing a low level in specific competenc-

es and focused school-oriented suggestions for recruiting of new faculty with ap-

propriate ICT competence profiles for enhancing the overall school ICT Competence

profile.

The Remedy Module. This module includes the mechanism for updating the teach-

ers' ICT Competence profiles and the level of schools' eMaturity. More specifically,

based on the outcomes from the generated suggestions of the Recommendation

Module, each School's ICT Competence Profile is appropriately updated, either au-

tomatically or manually.

The detailed analysis of the proposed School ICT Competence Management System archi-

tecture and functionalities is presented in the following section.

3. Design of the School ICT Competence Management System

3.1 User Groups

The School ICT Competence Management System aims to target two main user groups,

namely school teachers and school leaders. Each user group is described as follows:

School Teachers: this user group relates to (a) the individual school teachers of the

registered to the system schools and (b) school teachers that would like to be re-

cruited by the registered schools. Functionalities aimed at this group should include

mechanisms for submitting and updating their ICT Competence Profiles using "wiz-

ard-like" processes. Moreover, teachers should be provided with a comprehensive

tool for monitoring their current level of ICT Competence as well as its progress over

time within a given timeframe. Moreover, they should be provided with recommen-

dations for professional development courses towards improving their current ICT

12

competences. These improvements should be automatically updating their ICT Com-

petence Profile, as well as the eMaturity Profile of the school in which they are em-

ployed.

School Leaders: this user group relates to the schools' leaders of the registered to

the system schools and its functionalities should be targeted both at school-wide

level, as well as at individual school teacher level. The reason for this dual focus is re-

lated to the need of school leaders to have a highly granulated overview of both the

main processes performed in their institutions as well as the specific profiles of their

faculty. More specifically, at school-wide level, the proposed system should include

mechanisms for submitting and updating school's eMaturity Profile using "wizard-

like" processes. In addition, tools for detailed monitoring and management of the

level of school ICT Competence profile should be available both on the basis of a cur-

rent proficiency level at a specific point in time, as well as its progress over time

within a given timeframe. At individual teacher level, the system should facilitate the

faculty management process by allowing the school leaders to view the level of ICT

Competence of each teacher employed in their school. Moreover, the school leaders

should be provided with recommendations for recruiting suitable and available

teachers based on their Schools ICT Competence Profile. These recruitments, when

confirmed by school leaders, should automatically be updating their Schools’ ICT

Competence Profile.

3.2 System Architecture and Modules

The School ICT Competence Management System is a web-based system that allows school

teachers and leaders to measure and continuously monitor the level of their schools' ICT

Competence, by providing both their teachers’ ICT Competence and School eMaturity pro-

files correspondingly. The system should then employ specialized mechanisms for jointly

processing these data and generating strategic planning recommendations and remedy ac-

tions towards enhancing the level and quality of school ICT uptake. Figure 1 presents an

overview of the School ICT Competence Management System.

13

Figure 1: School ICT Competence Management System Architecture

As shown in Figure 1, the lowest level includes XML Native Databases, which host the ICT

Competence Profile of the schools registered to the system (namely the employed Teachers’

ICT Competence Profile and the School eMaturity Profile), as well as the ICT Competence

profiles of candidate teachers for recruitment. The next level includes the profile matching

mechanism, which is responsible for performing similarity matches between (a) the ICT

Competence Profiles of teachers, who are not employees of the registered schools and (b)

the eMaturity Profiles of these schools, towards providing input to the recommender mod-

ule of the top level for targeted job positioning. The details of this process are described in

the corresponding Recommender Module below. Finally, the top level of the system com-

prises three main modules, as follows:

The Diagnostic Module: This module is related to the most basic functionalities of

the system, which are mainly focused on capturing and visualizing the current level

of schools’ ICT Competence profiles. More specifically, it includes the following

mechanisms:

14

o Capturing Mechanism: this mechanism is used by school teachers and leaders for

manually submitting and updating their ICT Competence Profiles, as well for

manually submitting and updating the level of school eMaturity correspondingly.

Moreover, the submitted teachers’ or schools’ profiles are captured in a ma-

chine-readable manner, namely in XML format. This is done to allow for ad-

vanced processing functionalities and interoperability among different systems,

e.g., the externally hosted repositories of the professional development courses.

To this end, a review has been performed on the existing means of performing

this task, i.e. the existing specifications for describing competences, which was

presented in detail in (Zervas et al., 2014). The “Integrating Learning Outcomes

and Competences” (InLOC) specification (Hoel & Grant, 2013) was deemed as the

most robust, based on a critical analysis of the major competence description

specifications. Therefore, the InLOC specification was selected for the description

of both teachers’ ICT Competences, as well as the schools’ eMaturity profiles.

o Visualization Mechanism: This mechanism can be utilized from school teachers

for diagnostic purposes, namely for processing and visually depicting the current

level their current level of ICT Competence as well as its progress over time with-

in a given timeframe. Moreover, this mechanism can be also used by school

leaders for performing similar operations for their Schools eMaturity profile, as

well as for each teacher employed in their schools.

The Recommender Module: This module retrieves and analyzes the data that have

been stored from the Diagnostic module towards generating informed and personal-

ized recommendations for improvements on both levels of the School ICT Compe-

tence Profile. More specifically, it includes the following mechanisms:

o Professional Development Courses Recommender Mechanism: this mecha-

nism aims to recommend to school teachers targeted professional develop-

ment courses that are stored in external sources. The recommended courses

should be appropriate for supporting individual teachers to enhance areas of

their ICT Competence in which they show a low level of proficiency. The rec-

ommender mechanism should consider as input the teachers' current ICT

competence profile and the context that this is applied, namely the school

eMaturity Profile and should recommend appropriate professional develop-

15

ment courses for targeted ICT Competence enhancement. In case that these

courses’ learning outcomes are modeled based on the specific UNESCO ICT-

CFT competences they target to build, the participating teachers’ ICT compe-

tence profile could be automatically updated (upon completion of the

course) by the Remedy module. Otherwise, the Remedy module will expect

for manual input (by the school teacher or the school leader) of the ICT com-

petences attained towards updating their profile.

o Teacher Recruiting Recommender Mechanism: this mechanism aims to rec-

ommend to school leaders suitable and available teachers by considering the

School ICT competence Profile. The candidate teachers’ ICT Competence pro-

files are stored in the same database as the “employed” teachers, with the

difference that they are not linked to a particular school. These teachers will

have appropriate ICT Competence Profiles that provide an added value to the

overall School ICT Competence profile, based on its current needs. This

mechanism should also receive input from the profile matching mechanism

that has been previously described.

Remedy Module: This module receives input from both school teachers and school

leaders as a result of their actions performed based on the recommendations sug-

gested from the recommender module. More specifically, the Remedy module main

contribution is the profile updater mechanism, which aims to support semi-

automatic update of the School ICT competence Profile. This means that when a

teacher completes a suggested professional development course, the system should

be able to update (automatically or manually) his/her ICT competence profile ac-

cordingly to the attained or updated ICT Competences. Moreover, the eMaturity

Profile of the current school that this teacher belongs to, should also be automatical-

ly updated, since the enhanced competences of the teachers directly affect specific

elements of the school eMaturity level. Finally, in the case of a new recruitment, the

eMaturity profile of his/her school is also automatically updated for the aforemen-

tioned reasons.

4. Conclusions and Future Work

16

This paper initially discussed the identified need for effectively monitoring the wide range of

factors and processes that contribute to the level of ICT uptake of schools. These tasks are

essential for delineating focused strategic planning decisions and enhancing the level and

quality of ICT exploitation in schools.

Considering the evident difficulty of schools in engaging in these complex endeavors, a sig-

nificant need emerges for dedicated support systems that will offer functionalities for facili-

tating schools in capturing and interpreting their ICT Competence Profile data. Moreover,

the lack of relevant existing systems further strengthens the need to tackle this identified

problem.

Towards addressing the aforementioned need, the paper presented the architecture and

the core functionalities of a proposed web-based, school leadership decision support sys-

tem, namely the School ICT Competence Management System. More specifically, the pro-

posed system aims to tackle the existing previously identified problems by providing a tool

for schools to effectively capture and meaningfully interpret both levels of their ICT Compe-

tence profiles in a holistic manner, i.e., by considering the interrelations of these levels.

Moreover, it comprises dedicated recommender systems for generating targeted sugges-

tions for improvement based on the harvested data and the resulting analyses. An initial

implementation of some modules of the proposed system have been presented in (Sergis et

al., 2014).

Future work in this agenda involves two main action lines. First, the School ICT Competence

Management System will be fully implemented following the design principles presented in

this paper. Second, the proposed system will be evaluated by real school teachers and lead-

ers through a set of carefully designed experiments. More specifically, these evaluation ex-

periments will include the monitored deployment of the proposed system from a selected

"experimental" group of schools, during the implementation of their efforts to reach specific

levels of ICT Competence development over an adequate period of time. For each compe-

tence goal that is being set, the focus of the evaluation will be to assess the system's capa-

bility (a) to propose meaningful and useful visualizations of the current School ICT Compe-

tence level (Diagnostic Module) and (b) to produce accurate competence gap identification

17

and remedy recommendations (Recommender and Remedy Module). Therefore, the evalua-

tion process will include (a) usability evaluation of the visualization mechanisms of the Diag-

nostic Module and (b) classification accuracy evaluation of the Recommender Module in

terms of the identification of appropriate Professional Development Courses and/or Teacher

Recruits to assist schools in reaching the set ICT Competence goals.

Acknowledgments

The work presented in this paper has been partially supported by (a) the “Open Discovery

Space: A socially-powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure to boost the adop-

tion of eLearning Resources” Project that is funded by the European Commission's CIP-ICT

Policy Support Programme (Project Number: 297229) and (b) “Inspiring Science: Large Scale

Experimentation Scenarios to Mainstream eLearning in Science, Mathematics and Technol-

ogy in Primary and Secondary Schools” Project that is funded by the European Commission's

CIP-ICT Policy Support Programme (Project Number: 325123).

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