Notably valuable efforts have focused on helping people with special needs. In this work, we build upon the experience from the BlindHelper smartphone outdoor pedestrian navigation app and present Blind MuseumTourer, a system for indoor interactive autonomous navigation for blind and visually impaired persons and groups (e.g., pupils), which has primarily addressed blind or visually impaired (BVI) accessibility and self-guided tours in museums. A pilot prototype has been developed and is currently under evaluation at the Tactual Museum with the collaboration of the Lighthouse for the Blind of Greece. This paper describes the functionality of the application and evaluates candidate indoor location determination technologies, such as wireless local area network (WLAN) and surface-mounted assistive tactile route indications combined with Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons and inertial dead-reckoning functionality, to come up with a reliable and highly accurate indoor positioning system adopting the latter solution. The developed concepts, including map matching, a key concept for indoor navigation, apply in a similar way to other indoor guidance use cases involving complex indoor places, such as in hospitals, shopping malls, airports, train stations, public and municipality buildings, office buildings, university buildings, hotel resorts, passenger ships, etc. The presented Android application is effectively a Blind IndoorGuide system for accurate and reliable blind indoor navigation.

In the era of digitalization of learning and teaching processes, Educational Data Literacy (EDL) is highly valued and is becoming essential. EDL is conceptualized as the ability to collect, manage, analyse, comprehend, interpret, and act upon educational data in an ethical, meaningful, and critical manner. The professionals in the field of digitally supported education, i.e., Instructional Designers (IDs) and e-Tutors (eTUTs) of online and blended courses, need to be ready to inform their decisions with educational data, and face the upcoming data-related challenges; they need to update and enhance their profiles with relevant competences. This paper proposes a framework for EDL competence profiles of IDs/eTUTs and evaluates the proposal with the participation of worldwide professionals (N = 210) with experience in digitally supported education. The evaluation aims at validating the proposal and assesses (a) the current EDL-readiness of IDs/eTUTs; and (b) the extent to which the framework captures and describes the essential EDL competences. The findings indicate that professionals are not EDL-competent yet, but the proposed dimensions and related competences are offering a solid approach to support EDL development.

Educational Data Analytics (EDA) have been attributed with significant benefits for enhancing on-demand personalized educational support of individual learners as well as reflective course (re)design for achieving more authentic teaching, learning and assessment experiences integrated into real work-oriented tasks. This open access textbook is a tutorial for developing, practicing and self-assessing core competences on educational data analytics for digital teaching and learning. It combines theoretical knowledge on core issues related to collecting, analyzing, interpreting and using educational data, including ethics and privacy concerns. The textbook provides questions and teaching materials/ learning activities as quiz tests of multiple types of questions, added after each section, related to the topic studied or the video(s) referenced. These activities reproduce real-life contexts by using a suitable use case scenario (storytelling), encouraging learners to link theory with practice; self-assessed assignments enabling learners to apply their attained knowledge and acquired competences on EDL. By studying this book, you will know where to locate useful educational data in different sources and understand their limitations; know the basics for managing educational data to make them useful; understand relevant methods; and be able to use relevant tools; know the basics for organising, analysing, interpreting and presenting learner-generated data within their learning context, understand relevant learning analytics methods and be able to use relevant learning analytics tools; know the basics for analysing and interpreting educational data to facilitate educational decision making, including course and curricula design, understand relevant teaching analytics methods and be able to use relevant teaching analytics tools; understand issues related with educational data ethics and privacy. This book is intended for school leaders and teachers engaged in blended (using the flipped classroom model) and online (during COVID-19 crisis and beyond) teaching and learning; e-learning professionals (such as, instructional designers and e-tutors) of online and blended courses; instructional technologists; researchers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate university students studying education, educational technology and relevant fields.