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

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.