Dutch schools and suppliers of digital learning resources have taken the initiative to develop agreements that will facilitate the simple, safe and trust-based access to – and use of – digital learning resources for primary, secondary, vocational and special educational needs schools.
This scheme (or afsprakenstelsel in Dutch) will reduce the effort and risk associated with using digital applications for teaching purposes and will help schools to offer future-proof education that gets the best out of pupils and students.
Jointly developing mutual agreements about the legal, technical, functional and operational aspects of information exchange will create a data space for education: an ecosystem in which schools and suppliers of digital learning resources can seamlessly share data in a secure and convenient manner.
Uniform agreements can help to solve concrete challenges faced by schools on an everyday basis, such as by reducing the amount of time spent logging in to various systems, or by giving them better visibility into individual pupils’ or students’ progress towards their learning goals, or by allowing them to utilise digital applications in a safer and more privacy-friendly way. These are all important pillars of flexible and future-focused education.
The scheme is building on the outcomes of Edu-K, a public-private partnership that has already jointly developed a number of agreements, including the privacy covenant within which schools and suppliers of digital learning resources have formalised agreements about the processing of personal data.
Schools and suppliers of such digital learning resources have now taken the initiative to jointly create further agreements that will contribute to simple, safe and trust-based data sharing. Additionally, a supervisory body is being set up to oversee existing and new agreements.
This programme supports the education sector’s ambitions to further improve the quality of education in the Netherlands. It is partly financed by the Dutch government’s National Growth Fund.
“The National Growth Fund is helping schools and businesses to bundle their strengths to make digital education effective, user-friendly and safe,” says Dennis Wiersma, Dutch Minister for Primary and Secondary Education.
