Anticipating data sharing for student-centred education: Governmental policy initiatives in Switzerland and Japan

Abstract

In the context of digital transformation and platformisation of education, policy concerns are shifting from infrastructure to data use. New governmental initiatives attempt to facilitate data sharing between schools, research and governing authorities to improve student learning. These attempts to create public data spaces anticipate new topologies of data-based governance that strengthen the data-based exchange between classrooms and system governance. However, educational research has paid little attention to these initiatives towards public data spaces. This article addresses this gap by examining such initiatives in Switzerland and Japan, exploring how policy documents envision data-driven educational futures. While both promote student-centred education through personalised and individualised learning, they reveal culturally specific ambivalences around this focus on individual learning. These cases point not only to the unresolved technical and regulatory challenges of the data sharing plans but also to controversies regarding what kind of education such data are meant to support.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic?

• Educational practices, including those in primary and secondary schools, are increasingly situated within commercial platform infrastructures that extract and capitalise data from teaching and learning activities.
• Platforms are promoted to improve education by providing personalised learning tailored to individual learners' needs.
• Proprietary data infrastructures in public education raise significant ethical concerns, including concerns about data protection, infringements of student privacy and the commodification of educational data.

What this paper adds?

• National governments develop policy initiatives to enable data sharing among schools, researchers, administrators and policymakers within trustworthy public data spaces.
• These initiatives are not only concerned with technical standards and questions of regulation that allow data sharing across institutional boundaries but also encompass guiding visions of future education.
• This paper analyses the emerging data-sharing governmental initiatives in Switzerland and Japan and examines the visions of future education they articulate.
• In both countries, the initiatives reproduce the commercial platforms' promises to improve education through personalisation and individualisation, while expressing culturally distinct and ambivalent understandings of these student-centred approaches.

Implications for practice and/or policy

• In the context of the increasing platformisation of education, digital data have become central to informing, guiding and governing educational practices at all levels.
• The proposed data spaces could provide mechanisms for creating public value from data generated in public education, which is currently predominantly monetised by commercial platforms in primary and secondary schools.
• While technical and governance challenges are crucial, policymakers should also consider the educational aims and pedagogical visions that data infrastructures should advance.