[Open-education] Open Government Data: Helping Parents to find the Best School for their Kids

[Marieke Guy]

There is a great post on the Open Government Partnership blog about 
using open government data to help parents find the best school.
http://www.opengovpartnership.org/blog/radu-cucos/2014/06/03/open-government-data-helping-parents-find-best-school-their-kids

The post, by Radu Cucos from Moldova, lists several apps from different 
countries that have been built on government data related to education 
and education institutions. I'll be adding these to the Open Education 
Handbook 
<http://booktype.okfn.org/open-education-handbook/_draft/_v/1.0/open-data-use-cases/>.

He concludes by saying:

"Open data on schools has great value not only for parents but also for 
the educational system in general. Each country has its own school 
market, if education is considered as a product in this market. Perfect 
information about products is one of the main characteristics of 
competitive markets. From this perspective, giving parents the 
opportunity to have access to information about schools characteristics 
will contribute to the increase in the competitiveness of the schools 
market. Educational institutions will have incentives to improve their 
performance in order to attract more students.

While adopting the Open Data Initiative policy in the education field 
has advantages for everybody -- parents, schools and state authorities, 
it falls to governments to take the leading role in promoting Open Data. 
First of all, governments have to make sure that data on schools is 
being publicly released and regularly updated. Second, state 
institutions have to incentivize developers to create innovative apps. 
Third, governments have to increase demand for educational apps by 
raising awareness, lowering the costs for Open Data apps accessibility 
and decreasing the costs of accessing additional sources and information 
about schools."

I'd be interested in hearing more about this from a country perspective. 
Anyone got any interesting use cases to share?

We plan to have a community session on 'What has open data got to do 
with education' during June - details to follow.

Marieke

-- 

Marieke Guy
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