Digitalizing Teaching Processes – How to Create Usable Data with Minimal Effort

Abstract

Having enough timely and correct data is essential for decision making, and information systems (IS) are largely used to collect that data. However, the traditional form-based solutions do not always produce adequate data. Instead, since the systems do not support data collection in users' daily actions, they cause extra work, that may or may not be done depending, for example, on the users’ workload. This applies especially in education processes where wrongly designed IS not only causes extra work, but also reduces the autonomy of experts (teachers). This easily leads into the situation where an IS is not used, or it is used only ostensibly to fulfill the given orders. Either way, the data collected is not reliable. In addition, situation like this gives rise to informal procedures and practices: the official and practical ways do not match, and in practical way, no or little data is collected. Since the quality of data collection is emphasized especially in AI-based decision making, and since the process digitalization is affecting education processes as well, we see it important to find out how education processes should be digitalized in order to get timely data with good quality and coverage. Regarding this, we studied and participated on thesis management system development in Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, collected findings and formulated main fundamentals on creating usable data with minimal effort when digitalizing teaching process based on our findings.