The Impact of COVID-19 on Authoring Open Data Workshop Settings in

High School

Maria Anna Ambrosino, Vanja Annunziata, Giuseppina Gonnella and Maria Angela Pellegrino

Universit

a degli Studi di Salerno, via Giovanni Paolo II, 132 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy

Keywords:

Open Data, Open Data Authoring, Workshop, Education, School, Learning, Engagement, Remote, at a

Distance, High School.

Abstract:

According to the Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Data are data that can be freely used, created and shared

by anyone. Initiatives to let K-12 learners exploit Open Data are rare in literature, and the situation is even

worse if we look for opportunities to move them in the position of Open Data publishers. To advance the

dialogue around methods to increase awareness of Open Data, improve users’ skills to author and use Open

Data, HETOR regularly organises workshops with secondary school learners to let them create, publish, and

exploit Open Data by SPOD since 2016. While workshops were organised as physical meetings, during the

COVID-19 pandemic, HETOR required to revise the performed protocol. This article reports changes applied

to the workshops proposed by HETOR and the observed results in terms of quantity and quality of produced

open datasets, and quality of presenting and disseminating the authored Open Data by comparing workshops’

results before and after the COVID-19. According to the discussion, the quantity and quality of the workshops

outcome increased during the workshops that took place after the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrating that

Open Data based initiatives can successfully survive in remote settings. On the opposite, the quality of the

presentations authored by scholars is more heterogeneous during after-COVID workshops demonstrating that

remote settings make educational inequalities worse.

1 INTRODUCTION

“Open Data (OD) are data that can be freely used,

shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any

purpose” (Open Knowledge Foundation, 2013). OD

have the potential to improve government trans-

parency, citizen collaboration and participation, and

spur innovation (Harrison et al., 2012).

It is required to overcome the lack of technical

skills and domain knowledge, one of the key barri-

ers to OD use, to exploit OD to the best. Users need

more data literacy skills, as they are unaware of avail-

able OD (Martin et al., 2015) and how to get value

out of data (Safarov et al., 2017). Training is crucial

in letting users author and exploit OD effectively, but

there is limited research on strategies to train users

(Gasc

o-Hern

andez et al., 2018), scarce involvement

of citizens (Safarov et al., 2017; Styrin et al., 2017),

and isolated efforts to verify skills and tasks stake-

holders require to deal with data properly (Martin and

Begany, 2017; Susha et al., 2015). Moreover, citizens

usually play the role of OD users without having the

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8927-5833

possibility to author data of interest and experience

the challenges of the OD publication stage.

To increase awareness of OD, improve users’

skills to author and work with OD, and let K-12 learn-

ers develop data and information literacy, HETOR pro-

poses a series of workshops to allow high school

learners to familiarise themselves with OD. Work-

shops have been held annually since 2016 in the con-

text of school-work alternance. While HETOR usually

moderated workshops as physical meetings, COVID-

19 required a revision to the protocol to move to a

remote setting.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions that

followed caused many challenges in education (Antle

and Frauenberger, 2020; Iivari et al., 2020). Schools

switched to remote mode as well as all the learn-

ing activities held as curricular activities or as after-

school initiatives (Kinnula et al., 2021; Roumelioti

et al., 2022; Antelmi and Pellegrino, 2022). Chang-

ing learning activities into an online mode is chal-

lenging as it requires re-thinking collaborative inter-

actions among peers, adjusting the activity protocol,

and guaranteeing the presence and detailed guidance

474

Ambrosino, M., Annunziata, V., Gonnella, G. and Pellegrino, M.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Authoring Open Data Workshop Settings in High School.

DOI: 10.5220/0011743400003470

In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2023) - Volume 2, pages 474-482

ISBN: 978-989-758-641-5; ISSN: 2184-5026

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

of experienced instructors to support novice learn-

ers also at a distance (Kinnula et al., 2021). More-

over, engaging learners is potentially more challeng-

ing when held at a distance (Roumelioti et al., 2022).

This article reports the protocol experienced by

HETOR in letting scholars authoring and exploiting

OD, how it has been revised to face challenges

posed by the pandemic, and quantitative and qual-

itative comparison of the artifacts authored during

in-presence and remote workshops. The analysis

demonstrates that HETOR successfully adopted re-

motely a workshop protocol similar to the one expe-

rienced face-to-face. Remote workshops let scholars

produce a consistent number of open datasets during

remote workshops. Moreover, the quality of the pro-

duced OD is better in terms of completeness with re-

spect to the pre-COVID workshops. It could be jus-

tiﬁed by the possibility of taking the required time to

accomplish tasks. However, the quality of authored

presentations during post-COVID workshops is more

heterogeneous than during pre-COVID workshops. It

might be caused by the education inequalities that are

strengthened by remote learning activities.

The rest of the article is structured as follows. Sec-

tion 2 reports related work; section 3 overviews the

performed protocol both in presence and in remote

settings; section 4 describes quantitative and qualita-

tive observations collected during the last three edi-

tions of the HETOR workshops, while section 5 dis-

cusses challenges and outcomes observed during the

remote sessions if compared to the in-presence ac-

tivities to underline how the COVID-19 impact OD-

based workshops; the article concludes with ﬁnal re-

marks and suggestions for future OD authoring work-

shops.

2 RELATED WORK

In terms of skills needed to use OD, the Open Data In-

stitute (ODI) has developed a framework that includes

six basic skills sets (Open Data Institute, 2020), which

include an introduction, publishing by paying atten-

tion to data quality, management including building

communities, analysis including data visualization,

and value creation. This article adopts the ODI’s

framework because of its internal consistency and

wider scope. Moreover, being the guiding framework

for the ODI training strategy and practice, it has the

potential to offer academic and practical implications.

More and more researchers and educators recog-

nise the potentialities in using OD as an educational

resource (Piedra et al., 2017) targeting heterogeneous

goals. (

Alvarez Otero et al., 2018) and (Charvat et al.,

2017) focus on deeper learners skills in environmen-

tal education. While the GI-Learner project (

Alvarez

Otero et al., 2018) targets secondary school and ex-

ploits OD on the cloud to learn about protected ar-

eas in Spain, the SDI4Apps Open INSPIRE4Youth

(Charvat et al., 2017) encourages higher grades of el-

ementary schools, high schools, and universities to

reuse Linked Open Data (LOD) and environmental

data for educational and gaming purposes. (Basford

et al., 2016) raise awareness of rhino conservation by

prototyping Erica the Rhino, an interactive art exhibit

that implicitly allowed children to consume and pub-

lish LOD through Erica interaction. (Kurada et al.,

2021; Windhager et al., 2016; De Donato et al., 2021)

discuss the role plaid by data visualisation in letting

learners make sense of complex data.

Interventions to improve users’ skills and knowl-

edge are rare in the literature and mainly focus on

OD exploitation. (Gasc

o-Hern

andez et al., 2018) de-

scribe and compare interventions to increase aware-

ness of OD, enhance users’ skills and engage them in

the use of OD. (Chen et al., 2014; Dickinson et al.,

2015; Vargianniti and Karpouzis, 2020) proposed OD

game-based workshops to engage learners while let-

ting them learn. (Wolff et al., 2019; Saddiqa et al.,

2019b) let learners exploit OD in improving their

awareness of environment and smart city develop-

ment. (Saddiqa et al., 2019a; Antelmi and Pellegrino,

2022) focused on the importance and challenges of

mastering OD visualisations.

Usually, OD-based workshops are organised in

physical meetings. Rare are online workshops. (Var-

gianniti and Karpouzis, 2020; Antelmi and Pel-

legrino, 2022) were forced to move lessons re-

motely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Vargian-

niti and Karpouzis, 2020) propose a digital version of

Geopoly, a game similar to Monopoly that exploits

OD to learn about geography. It successfully kept

learners engaged and motivated, which was especially

difﬁcult given that schools were closed and strict mea-

sures were enforced during the experiment. (Antelmi

and Pellegrino, 2022) focused on OD visualisation

mixing theory classes and hands-on sessions. Despite

promising learning and engagement outcomes, mod-

erators observed participants’ reluctance to switch on

cameras and technological immaturity that hindered

activities in remote settings.

In all the previously cited workshops, learners

consume data without having the possibility to author

data of interest. HETOR’s workshops move secondary

school learners to the position of OD publishers, let-

ting them experience the challenges inherent in the

role of data curator.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Authoring Open Data Workshop Settings in High School

475

3 WORKSHOP DESIGN

3.1 Research Questions

The main research goal of this article relates to under-

standing the impact caused by COVID-19 on the ar-

tifacts authored by participants in the proposed work-

shops. Our aim is translated into a single research

question (RQ): What is the impact of COVID-19 on

OD authoring workshops?

3.2 Protocol

HETOR workshops include both authoring and ex-

ploitation stages. Each workshop includes an intro-

ductory phase and a hands-on session. In the in-

troductory phase, the moderators explain concepts,

encourage participants to reply to questions and

quick oral exercises, and clarify any doubt. During

the hands-on session, participants work on the as-

signed task in groups of four or ﬁve members, asyn-

chronously assisted by the moderator when needed.

Details on the learning content of each workshop (W

with # progressive number) follow.

: Authoring OD. W

introduces OD and SPOD

as an authoring platform to collaboratively create OD.

According to the class and groups’ interests, the mod-

erators assign a topic related to the open datasets

scholars are invited to create during the hands-on ses-

sion. During the hands-on session, scholars are organ-

ised into small groups of four or ﬁve members. Each

group has to look for publicly available data related

to the assigned topic to populate the authored dataset

collaboratively. The outcome of this workshop is the

authored (portion of a) dataset stored as a data table

in the SPOD platform.

: OD Exploitation. W

introduces OD exploita-

tion by data visualisation and the chart authoring

mechanism implemented in SPOD. Then, scholars are

invited to co-create and discuss charts starting from

the authored datasets. This workshop’s outcome is a

data representation collection that visually describes

the authored dataset content.

: Dissemination. W

focuses on the dissemi-

nation of the created value. Scholars are invited to

author a presentation to overview the performed ac-

tivities and summarise the created value in authoring

and exploiting OD. The outcome of this workshop is

a presentation containing at least the context in terms

of learnt concepts and the used tools, dataset details

in terms of topic and content, dataset visualisation(s),

conclusive observations, and opinions. Presentations

are held as public or private events, within the class,

the school, or among schools, based on the possibili-

ties. Each group had 15 minutes to report their work.

3.3 Participants and Setting

The workshops described in the protocol section have

been moderated by the two researchers of HETOR

since 2016. 9 high schools spontaneously joined the

HETOR project for free by contacting the HETOR associ-

ation and asking for moderating workshops to let high

school learners familiarise themselves with OD. Each

school decides the involved classes, the workshops

duration and settings according to available hours and

its lessons’ requirements, while the HETOR associa-

tion proposes the workshops topics. All the learn-

ers belonging to the involved classes have to attend

the HETOR activities. Since 2018, 6 high schools have

been involved, with a total of 471 high school learn-

ers. All of them needed to familiarise themselves with

concepts related to data literacy (e.g., data manipula-

tion and chart creation) and tools used to perform data

exploitation (e.g., Excel and Google Sheet). Partici-

pants’ ages ranged from 16 to 19 years old. Meetings

usually start in December (or January at most) and

are scheduled until May. While hands-on sessions are

conceived as self-learning activities with the oppor-

tunity to asynchronously discuss with the moderators

through SPOD, theory classes are organised in pres-

ence or online at a distance due to COVID-19 reg-

ulations. Workshops took place as school-work al-

ternance, i.e., curricular hours dedicated to education

or training that combine periods in an educational in-

stitution and the workplace. The workplace is a vir-

tual platform, SPOD, where scholars can author and

exploit OD collaboratively. Workshops were part of

curricular lessons or took place as after-school activ-

ities based on the school timetable or pandemic re-

Table 1: Summary of participants and setting of the last three OD authoring workshops.

Year Setting Schools Scholars Theory classes Dissemination

number number setting event setting

2018-2019 After-school 3 63 In presence Public, in presence

2020-2021 Curricular 3 291 Remote Public or private, remote

2021-2022 Curricular 3 117 Remote Private, in person or remote

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

476

Table 2: Metrics for assessing the presentation quality.

Metrics Description Score

Aestheticism Attention to details in authoring a presentation pleasant to look at. {0,0.5,1}

Charts Proper use of charts to support statements. {0,0.5,1}

Conciseness Avoid verbose slides. {0,0.5,1}

Context Details to contextualise the contribution of the authored dataset. {0,0.5,1}

Language Lexical correctness and proper use of domain-speciﬁc terms. {0,0.5,1}

Requirements The presentation should contain a brief introduction of OD and SPOD authored dataset de-

tails and screen, data visualisation(s), conclusive personal considerations, authors’ details

{0,0.5,1}

Time Reasonable number of slides in 15 minutes presentation. {0,0.5,1}

quirements. It is worth clarifying that HETOR’ work-

shops focus on OD authoring and exploitation and

communication and dissemination. This article deals

only with the ﬁrst type of workshop. Details of work-

shops discussed in this article are summarised in Ta-

ble 1 which reports the number of involved schools

and learners per year, and the workshop settings.

3.4 Tools

The OD authoring (W

) and the exploitation (W

)

workshops rely on SPOD. SPOD

(Cordasco et al.,

2017) is a social platform allowing the co-creation of

OD, OD exploitation by data visualisations, and data-

driven discussions in virtual public places. Hence,

users can create OD in tabular format collaboratively

within SPOD. Moreover, authored datasets can be visu-

alised by dynamic charts that make collected data eas-

ily understandable. Charts can be downloaded as dy-

namic components and imported into blogs and web

pages or as images for static presentations. During

hands-on sessions, independently from the workshop

setting, learners could chat with the HETOR’s modera-

tors via SPOD to pose questions and ask for support.

The theory classes of the post-COVID workshops

took place via Google Meet synchronous videocon-

ferencing tool. Only if explicitly required by the

participating school, the HETOR moderators organ-

ised synchronous video-conferences also during the

hands-on sessions. It happened once.

3.5 Data Gathering

The moderators collected the authored artifacts at the

end of each workshop. Hence, they have access to

the authored datasets and presentations. To evaluate

how COVID-19 inﬂuenced the quality of the work-

shops’ outcomes, we considered the quantity and the

quality of the authored datasets and the quality of the

presentations. The quality of the datasets is evaluated

SPOD: http://spod.databenc.it

in terms of incompleteness by counting the percent-

age of missing values. The quality of the presenta-

tions has been evaluated in terms of appropriateness

to the time available, degree of contextualisation, care

of aestheticism, use of charts to support statements,

conciseness level, language skills, and degree of com-

pliance with guidelines. Two domain experts itera-

tively deﬁned these metrics and performed a two-step

procedure to evaluate participants’ projects. First, the

experts independently reviewed each presentation ac-

cording to the metrics reported in Table 2; then, they

resolved inconsistencies through discussions. The ﬁ-

nal score associated with each presentation is the sum

of the score of each metric. Thus, the maximum score

per presentation is 7 (the higher, the better).

4 RESULTS

This section reports the quantitative and qualitative

assessment of datasets and presentations according to

the metrics described in Section 3.

Quantity and Quality of Open Datasets. This sec-

tion quantiﬁes and estimates the quality of datasets

authored by scholars. HETOR activities focus on the

preservation and digitisation of National and Regional

cultural heritage, as observed by the datasets name in

Table 3. All the authored datasets are modelled as

data tables where learners are in charge of populat-

ing data table rows according to the required columns

to model agreed topics. Learners have to look for

required information by googling them, using ofﬁ-

cial cultural heritage resources, or getting in touch

with cultural heritage site contact points. Each dataset

might be either authored by a single group or can

result from the concatenation of rows authored by

each group. All the datasets are published as OD

on CKAN. Table 3 summarises the size of authored

datasets in terms of the number of rows, columns, and

cells and their quality in terms of incompleteness, es-

timated by counting the number of empty cells. Ta-

The Impact of COVID-19 on Authoring Open Data Workshop Settings in High School

477

Table 3: Quantity and quality of OD authored by all the involved schools, year by year. Real names of towns, provinces, and

area are omitted due to the anonymity requirement.

Dataset Number Number Number Number of Empty cells

of rows of cols of cells empty cells on total

Regional forests 10 19 190 16 8%

Regional seed woods 17 19 323 26 8%

Start-up, small and medium enterprises 153 21 3,213 398 12%

Enterprises in Battipaglia and Eboli 168 22 3,696 586 16%

Regional farmhouses 206 15 3,090 597 19%

Regional social farms 19 22 418 92 22%

Former Borbon prison monumental complex 95 18 1,710 371 22%

Regional slow food principals 89 15 1,135 337 30%

2018/2019 - 8 datasets 757 151 13,775 2,423 18%

Caserta municipalities 104 21 2,184 94 4%

Avellino municipalities 118 24 2,832 213 8%

Salerno municipalities 158 24 3,792 362 9%

Caserta points of interest 1,314 13 17,082 2,568 15%

Avellino points of interest 1,439 13 18,707 2,882 15%

Agro Nocerino points of interest 283 12 3,396 512 15%

2020/2021 - 6 datasets 3,416 107 47,993 6,631 14%

National abandoned railway lines 287 9 2,583 36 1%

Museum of Cilento and Policastro Gulf 69 17 1,173 126 11%

Museum of Mathematics 53 18 954 117 12%

National computer science museums & collections 38 16 608 88 14%

2021/2022 - 4 datasets 447 60 5,318 367 7%

aestheticism charts

conciseness

context

language

requirements time

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Metrics values

Metrics details

2018/2019

2020/2021

2021/2022

Figure 1: Scores per metric.

ble 3 reports datasets per year, sorted according to the

percentage of empty cells.

Quality of Presentations. This section reports the

quality assessment of presentations according to met-

rics described in Table 2. Table 4 reports the number

of presentations per year and statistics of scores as-

signed and revised by two independent ﬁeld experts.

Figure 2 graphically compares qualitative assessment

of presentations per year, while Figure 1 reports the

score distributions per metric and year.

Table 4: Qualitative assessment of presentations.

Year Num. of Min Mean St.Dev. Max

groups score score score

’18-’19 3 4.0 4.83 0.76 5.5

’20-’21 21 1.5 4.57 1.36 7.0

’21-’22 7 2.0 4.50 1.44 7.0

2018/2019 2020/2021 2021/2022

Presentation scores

Presentations’ assessment

Figure 2: Qualitative assessment of presentations per year.

5 DISCUSSION

This section discusses results by organising observa-

tions according to protocol modiﬁcations to be com-

pliant with the COVID-19 restrictions, the impact on

the authored OD and the scholars’ presentations, re-

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

478

current problems and challenges observed during the

workshops.

Minimum Modiﬁcations to the Protocol to Com-

ply with the COVID-19 Restrictions. The proto-

col described in Section 3 is the same performed

during in-person and remote OD authoring work-

shops. COVID-19 only impacted the activity setting

as participating schools modiﬁed the school-work al-

ternance training activities from after-school initia-

tives to curricular activities. It can be observed in Ta-

ble 1 noting that workshops moved from after-school

setting in 2018/2019 (before COVID-19) to curricular

activities in 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 (after COVID-

19). According to the moderators, this shift from

physical to remote workshops without applying any

protocol change was possible thanks to the exploita-

tion of SPOD that natively offers collaborative sup-

port without requiring in-person interactions. In fact,

scholars can co-create open datasets working on the

same table at the same time and can discuss doubts

through in-site chats. The moderators complain about

the impact caused by the COVID-19 on the dissem-

ination event setting. During the 2018/2019, it took

place as a public event letting all the involved schools

to join to the same event with the special presence of

guests of honour, such as OD experts, guests from the

Regional Council. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic,

public in person events have been replaced to remote

versions of the same events or as private events with-

out constructive competition among schools and spe-

cial guests as motivators.

COVID-19 Has not Affected the Quantity and

Quality of the Authored Datasets. The OD author-

ing workshops kept on producing open datasets, as

visible in Table 3. It is worth noting that the number

of authored datasets depends on the number of partic-

ipants, groups, and scholars’ interests, while the size

of each dataset strictly depends on the datasets’ topic

and the modelled columns. Hence, we cannot directly

compare the number of datasets or their size to partic-

ipants to quantify the effort. However, we can notice

that scholars actively worked to open datasets in re-

mote settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Con-

cerning the quality of the produced datasets, we es-

timated their completeness by counting the percent-

age of empty cells, as usually performed in tabular

datasets. Incomplete information may be caused by

i) lack of available information (as observed in For-

mer Borbon prison monumental complex), ii) lack

of interest in deeply looking for them on Google,

shyness in requesting information by ofﬁcial contact

points, iii) not the applicability of required column

to speciﬁc rows. According to the results reported

in Table 3, we can conclude that the quality of the

produced datasets improved. It moved from a total

of 18% of incomplete cells during 2018/2019 to 7%

during 2021/2022.

According to the workshops’ moderators, the low-

est scores may be caused by difﬁculties in engag-

ing scholars or perceiving the difﬁculties encountered

by the shyest learners and supporting them oppor-

tunely. In fact, during in-person activities, modera-

tors can easily detect scholars’ mood by looking at

them at work or adapting the theory classes to their

facial reactions. On the opposite, during remote ses-

sions, scholars rarely switch on cameras and are reluc-

tant to pose questions (Antelmi and Pellegrino, 2022).

Moreover, lack of technical skills is an obstacle in

sharing doubts in remote settings as most participants

have difﬁculties sharing their screens and dealing with

multiple tools at the same time (Antelmi and Pelle-

grino, 2022).

Great Variability of Participants’ Performance in

Remote Settings. Concerning the qualitative as-

sessment of the authored presentations, it is worth

recalling that scores may range from 0 to 7. Ta-

ble 4 schematically reports scores achieved by schol-

ars’ groups in each workshop year. During the

pre-COVID workshops (i.e., during 2018/2019), pre-

sentations’ scores are almost homogeneous, ranging

from 4 to 5.5 with a mean score of 4.83. Scores

are signiﬁcantly more variable and heterogeneous

during the post-COVID workshops (i.e., during the

2020/2021 and 2021/2022), ranging from a minimum

score of 1.5 in 2020/2021 to a maximum score of 7 in

both years. It is even more visible in Figure 2, which

reports the box plot of the qualitative assessment of

presentations per year. The remote setting seems to

accentuate the scholars’ differences in the propensity

to work and make the educational inequalities worse.

It is discussed further in the following.

Focus on Opportunities and Challenges of Remote

Workshops. The same variability of participants’

performance can be observed if we focus on metrics

details, graphically reported in Figure 1. As a gen-

eral pattern, during 2018/2019, scores are more ho-

mogeneous than during the following years in most of

the metrics. During 2020/2021, scores span the entire

range, from 0 to 1, follow a similar pattern in most of

the metrics, and are above 0.5 for most of the partic-

ipants. In 2021/2022, scores are very heterogeneous,

covering the entire range in most metrics.

The care for aestheticism improved after the

COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, while during

The Impact of COVID-19 on Authoring Open Data Workshop Settings in High School

479

2018/2019, the maximum score in aestheticism was

0.5, in the following years, presentations achieved the

maximum score. Moreover, in 2020/2021, most pre-

sentations gained a score greater than 0.5. Hence,

most of the participants also curated the appearance

of the presentation. A similar trend is observed in the

context metric, as the ability to contextualise the per-

formed activity improved during the COVID-19 pan-

demic. It can be justiﬁed by the possibility of taking

the required time to accomplish the assigned tasks and

curate them opportunely. Moreover, after COVID-

19, workshops were organised as curricular activities

without requiring scholars to carve out time for ex-

tracurricular activities by limiting required workload.

The language is the unique metric that remains

unchanged during the different workshops, underly-

ing that it is a recurrent problem to master domain-

speciﬁc terms. Also, the ability to be concise follows

a similar pattern during the different editions, achiev-

ing slightly lower scores during 2021/2022. It might

be caused by the absence of pressure in having pre-

sentations with a restricted audience or, even worse,

without a public. This hypothesis supports also the

worsening of time metric scores, that decreased after

the COVID-19 pandemic.

If we focus on chart usage, scores decreased after

2020. It might be caused by the difﬁculties to expe-

rience the theory classes remotely, perhaps due to the

easiness in being distracted in remote settings.

Concerning the requirements metric, during

2021/2022, scholars diligently complied with the pro-

vided indications, achieving very high scores. It sup-

ports the hypothesis that in remote settings, scholars

need clear tasks and indications to follow. Hence,

moderators should be concise on theory classes to

minimise the possibility of distraction and require

scholars’ concentration for a limited time interval.

Remote Workshops Strengthen Educational In-

equalities. The heterogeneity observed in the pre-

sentations’ qualitative assessment might be justiﬁed

by the negative impact that remote workshops have

on educational inequalities. Researchers and interna-

tional organisations have studied the effects of school

closures on scholars’ learning and found a measur-

able loss in the acquisition of basic skills, particularly

for the most disadvantaged children, also before 2020

(Quinn et al., 2016; Cattaneo et al., 2017). COVID-19

pandemic and distance learning ampliﬁed education

inequalities across the world (Blask

o et al., 2022).

Distance learning effectiveness crucially depends

on learners’ possibilities to attend virtual classes

(Bonacini and Murat, 2021). Online learning requires

appropriate equipment (a computer to fully take ad-

vantage of the workshops described in this paper) and

a satisfying Internet connection (Bonacini and Mu-

rat, 2021). They should not be given for granted, as

demonstrated by the analysis performed by (Blask

et al., 2022). To cope with the lack of equipment,

governments or school provided learners and edu-

cators with computers (Bonacini and Murat, 2021).

Even when learners can access remote learning, ed-

ucation at a distance strengthens the gap between

scholars from different socio-economic backgrounds

(Coe et al., 2020). Learners may have different in-

ternet connectivity conditions and unequal opportuni-

ties to access technological devices to carry out their

schoolwork (Bonal and Gonz

alez, 2020). Scholars

might be required to share their devices with siblings

or parents (Bonacini and Murat, 2021) and might be

forced to join online activities by tablets or smart-

phones (Cordini and De Angelis, 2021). During the

workshops described in this paper, the HETOR’s mod-

erators noticed that several learners attended work-

shops by smartphones, even if they clearly asked for a

computer at the beginning of the workshops. It might

affect performance, engagement, and outcome qual-

ity due to the difﬁculties in dealing with SPOD and

software to author presentations on small screen de-

vices. Hence, learners who were not provided with a

computer caused slowdowns both during the hands-

on sessions since they were not able to use SPOD via

smartphones and after workshops since they were re-

quired to carry out the assigned activities at a later

time. Moreover, scholars and moderators experienced

Internet connection issues due to adverse weather

conditions and the participation of learners residing in

decentralised municipalities where the Internet con-

nection was not stable.

Families might be unprepared for distance learn-

ing and homeschooling (Cordini and De Angelis,

2021). Hence, when learners require adult support,

it is not obvious to consider parents’ support equiv-

alent to the educators’ or moderators’ one. Parents

might need more skills or time (due to their work)

to properly support learners. Conditions for effec-

tive learning, such as clear explanations, scaffolding,

and teacher feedback, are challenging to accomplish

(Bonal and Gonz

alez, 2020). Moreover, asking for

support can also be hindered by difﬁculties in clearly

reporting the faced difﬁculties, the shyness in publicly

asking for help, or technological deﬁciencies in shar-

ing the screen and giving moderators the possibility

to solve problems, clarify doubts, and reply to ques-

tions. The moderators also noticed a need for greater

digital skills in data analysis tools, video-conference

software, screen-sharing mechanisms, and keyboard

shortcuts to speed up OD authoring via SPOD.

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480

A non-trivial factor is the presence of distractions

at home and the importance of having a quiet place

to study (Bol, 2020). Educators and moderators are

responsible for instilling an atmosphere conducive to

learning in the classroom. When children switch to

online learning programs, they quickly discover that

the same setting is hard to recreate at home. As a

result, the level of engagement in online learning is

lower, and children with weaker self-discipline come

under signiﬁcant pressure.

While distance learning seems to have the poten-

tial to democratise education due to the absence of

physical barriers and geographical constraints, not go-

ing to school reduces learning opportunities for all.

However, learners from low-income backgrounds and

less-skilled learners are lagging behind (Bonal and

Gonz

alez, 2020).

6 CONCLUSIONS

According to their deﬁnition, OD can be created by

anyone. However, rarely are scholars moved to the

position of OD publishers. A tentative step to ﬁll

this gap is proposed by HETOR that regularly organises

OD authoring workshops with high-school learners in

the context of school-work alternace training activi-

ties since 2016. While workshops are usually held as

physical meetings, COVID-19 forces HETOR to move

the workshops to remote settings. The performed

protocol succeeded in being adapted without under-

going substantial variations thanks to the used plat-

form, SPOD, that supports co-creation also remotely.

To estimate the impact of COVID-19 on the OD au-

thoring workshops (RQ), we estimated the quantity

of the produced open datasets, their quality in terms

of completeness, and the quality of the dissemination

presentations authored by scholars to overview the

performed activity. While the produced datasets im-

proved in quantity and quality after COVID-19, the

presentations’ quality obtained more heterogeneous

results. Hence, OD authoring workshops successfully

survived COVID-19. However, remote settings make

educational inequalities worse.

To further improve the outcome of future work-

shops, HETOR’s moderators remark that it is crucial

to ask for school educators’ support during activities

to gain a more homogeneous quality of authored arti-

facts. It might also be helpful to consider a modiﬁca-

tion to the performed protocol to introduce a reﬂec-

tion phase to discuss performed errors collectively,

encourage less motivated scholars or learners that

faced challenges in completing tasks to improve the

authored artifacts and let them reﬁne them according

to the collected suggestions. Availability of required

equipment and a favourable learning setting must be

carefully veriﬁed to avoid learners’ disengagement

and frustration.

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