This note provides an overview of Iceland’s digital education ecosystem, including the digital tools for system and institutional management and digital resources for teaching and learning that are publicly provided to schools and educational stakeholders. The note outlines how public responsibilities for the governance of digital education are divided and examines how Iceland supports the equitable and effective access to and use of digital technology and data in education. This includes through practices and policies on procurement, interoperability, data privacy and regulation, and digital competencies. Finally, the note discusses how Iceland engages in any initiatives, including with the EdTech sector, to drive innovation and research and development towards an effective digital ecosystem.
Country Digital Education Ecosystems and Governance
14. Iceland
Abstract
Key features
In Iceland, the government publicly provides some of the digital tools and resources available in the country’s digital infrastructure for education. However, their use is rarely mandated. Schools and teachers, supported by municipalities in primary and lower secondary education and by the ministry in upper secondary education and VET, have all freedom to acquire additional digital tools and resources.
In this largely devolved context, the central government aims to ensure equal access to a digital ecosystem of tools and resources for everyone by providing guidance and support on procurement and by integrating digital components into the national curricula. Other policy levers to foster the (homogeneous) uptake of digital tools are in the hands of municipalities, especially as regards teacher training requirements.
Iceland incentivises the development and uptake of digital tools by awarding competitive grants to individuals and organisations, subsidising the EdTech sector and facilitating its collaboration with schools. However, digitalisation is not central in the government’s strategy in education, and the regulation of digital technology and data in education to improve data protection, privacy, interoperability or use in the academic research is limited.
General policy context
Division of responsibility
In Iceland, the Ministry of Education and Children is responsible for outlining general education strategy and devising policy, preparing, and implementing legislation, issuing regulations, setting curricula, and planning reforms from pre-primary to secondary education, including VET. While the ministry is also responsible for the operation of schools in upper secondary education and VET, this responsibility is devolved to municipalities (through municipal school boards) in primary and lower secondary education.1
Public responsibilities for providing access to, supporting the uptake of, and regulating the use of digital technologies in education follows this devolved context, with part of the digital education infrastructure provided centrally and large bits acquired locally. The ministry is the only public provider of the few available digital tools for system management, whose use is generally compulsory in upper secondary education and VET; but providing access to public tools for institutional management or for teaching and learning purposes is a responsibility shared between the central government in upper secondary education and VET, and municipalities in primary and lower secondary education. Schools and teachers can use and complement teaching and learning resources at their discretion, in full autonomy.
Regulation around the access to and use of digital tools and data in education generally falls within the remit of the central government, although specific rules (see teacher requirements for instance) and further guidelines may exist for primary and lower secondary education at the municipal level.
Digital education strategy
Digitalisation ranks high on the policy agenda in Iceland. The country has long embraced a global vision for its digital transformation, with its government striving to digitise all public services. Digital Iceland, an agency operated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, works towards these goals and ensures a coherent development and use of digital technologies across all ministries and ministries’ agencies.
Given that educational institutions operate with a high degree of autonomy from the central government – even in upper secondary education and VET, where the central government maintains overall responsibility for their operations – Iceland has not devised a digital strategy specific to education nor has it significantly changed its expenditures in hardware equipment for schools in recent years. The last White Paper on education reform, published in 2015, does mention that “digital technologies must be incorporated into teaching” and that their integration in the classroom should be paired with a profound review of teaching practices – but digitalisation is not a central feature of subsequent proposals/policies introduced by the ministry. This does not mean that the digital transformation of the education sector lags behind that of other public services, as evidenced by the high levels of digital hardware infrastructure that schools in the country enjoy; however, it does highlight the limited role that the central government plays in the public provision, governance, and regulation of digital infrastructure in education.
The public digital education infrastructure
The Icelandic government provides few components of the public digital ecosystem in education. Schools and teachers can then choose to acquire additional elements to their digital ecosystem, either directly from the business sector or from other education stakeholders that release tools and resources for free (e.g. philanthropists, education publishers, universities, teachers). This section reviews two aspects of the public digital infrastructure in Iceland: digital tools for system and school management, and digital learning resources for teaching and learning.
Digital ecosystem for system and school management
Student information system and learning management system
As the responsibilities for governing the operations of primary and lower secondary schools are entirely devolved to municipalities, it is only in upper secondary education and VET that the central government provides a digital infrastructure of tools to support system management.
The cornerstone of this infrastructure is INNA, a digital tool that combines the functionalities of a student information system, a learning management system, a student admission management system, a customer relationship management system, a digital system for exam administration and a digital credential system.2 INNA is made up of several modules provided online as a web system, making it available to a large span of education stakeholders anywhere, anytime, from any type of device (including smartphones). For students, INNA is mostly an interface where they can access an overview of their courses, view their attendance, submit assignments, and see their grades. After graduation, students can download their school certificates and study records. For teachers, INNA is a platform where they can share resources and communicate with their students, manage their teaching, and make use of the project and exam module to send group or individual assignments and grade them. For schools, INNA is a learning management system that supports day-to-day operations (e.g. timetables), offers communication resources with students and parents, and manages the accounting of school fees. Finally, for the ministry’s National Institute of Education at the central level, INNA functions as a student information system that assigns students with a national identification number and collects longitudinal data (e.g. study records, attendance, grades, diplomas), links them with their teachers, as well as with teacher-given grades and with their standardised assessment results (in VET), and stores all data on the institute’s enrolment portal (a central student register). INNA provides information in real time and displays analytics dashboards at the school and system levels. Those dashboards are not publicly available, but some data are aggregated and publicly published by Statistics Iceland.
In primary and lower secondary education, the central government does not operate a student information system hence schools cannot use INNA as their learning management system. Instead, schools use learning management systems that are generally procured by their municipalities. The government does not require schools to use an LMS, but it requires them to keep track of their students’ information, and in particular their grades, so that such information can eventually be pushed into INNA. InfoMentor and Námfús are two commercial examples of learning management systems commonly used across the country’s primary and lower secondary schools.3
Admission and guidance
In upper secondary education and VET, INNA also serves the purpose of a student admission management system.4 When students apply for a new school online, after they graduate or relocate, they can readily download an “educational resume” of their studies prepared by INNA and attach it to their application. Instructions and guidance on the admission process are available on the National Institute of Education’s webpage, in Icelandic and in English; and other educational institutions or business associations maintain websites to help students find the study tracks or jobs of their choice.5 Building on this, the institute is developing a digital portfolio that will accompany the launch of a digital credential system.
Such a unified admission management system does not exist in primary and lower secondary education, where schools are operated by municipalities. Instead, parents fill in separate application forms for their children directly on the websites of those schools.
Other tools
Icelandic schools also have access to additional digital tools for system and school management that are not publicly provided by the central government. The knowledge management systems that most schools use is an example, as it often consists of an iLibrary linked with a physical library in their local vicinity.
Digital ecosystem for teaching and learning
Providing access to some digital resources for teaching and learning is also partly a public responsibility, although the lines of responsibility for providing such resources between the central and lower levels of government are not as clearly defined as for system and institutional management.
The central government provides certain types of teaching and learning resources freely and openly to the public, like TV and radio education (not broadcast anymore, but available online), for all levels of education, as well as open educational resources (OER) targeting primary and lower secondary education levels – but available to everyone. Also, the central government provides static and interactive digital learning resources to primary and lower secondary schools, a digital assessment system for VET (e.g. a bank of assessment items), and an online platform for teacher development at all levels of education.6
Municipalities can also provide additional resources for teaching and learning, but the exact offer differs across municipalities. As in most other OECD countries, no statistical report formerly attests to the uptake of digital tools and resources in the field, whether they are centrally provided or locally or independently procured. However, government officials estimate that a sizeable majority of teachers and students, across all levels of education, have access to static and interactive digital learning resources, including resources for students with special needs and virtual classroom environments.
Access, use and governance of digital technologies and data in education
Ensuring access and supporting use
Equity of access
In Iceland, as in other Nordic countries, the government aims to provide equal access to education and educational resources to everyone – therefore no specific student groups or school types are marked as a policy priority.
Data collected by the OECD TALIS study across the 2017/2018 school year provide some evidence of the equity of access to digital infrastructure across Iceland, at least in terms of access to hardware infrastructure (OECD, 2022[1]).7 Before the COVID-19 outbreak, only 5% of lower secondary principals reported that their schools’ capacity to provide quality instruction was hindered by shortage or inadequacy of digital technology for instruction, and 3% that it was hindered by insufficient internet access (compared to 25% and 19%, respectively, on average across the OECD).
However, having equitable access to hardware infrastructure does not necessarily lead to equity in the use of software tools. Sections below describe what efforts Iceland deploys to measure and bridge the gap between availability and uptake.
Supporting the use of digital tools and resources
The ministry uses direct and indirect incentives to support the access to and use of digital tools and resources at the system, school, and classroom levels, especially in upper secondary education and VET as governance of these education levels falls within its remit.
First, the ministry mandates the use of some of the tools it directly provides or procures, typically when it concerns tools for system and school management (e.g. INNA, the student information system). It has also integrated the use of digital resources for teaching and learning into the curriculum requirements of primary and lower secondary education.
Second, while the ministry gives schools and teachers full autonomy to procure additional digital tools and resources at their discretion, it supports them in doing so in various ways. In upper secondary education and VET for instance, the ministry negotiates with suppliers the price and contractual conditions of the largest, or most common, digital tools that schools want to acquire; and it allocates earmarked subsidies for their purchase; and in primary and lower secondary education, it mandates another organisation, the Directorate for Education (“Menntamálastofnun”), to assist schools with procurement.
Finally, the ministry provides guidance on the use of its centrally provided tools. It also provides professional learning opportunities for administrative staff to improve their use of data and digital management tools, and for teachers to improve their use of digital resources in their teaching. To ensure a smoother navigation between the different pieces of the public-side of this ecosystem, the ministry has deployed Digital Iceland’s login, a single sign-on (SSO) service hosted by Amazon Web Services.
Cultivating the digital literacy of education stakeholders
Iceland aims to engage all education actors in the digital transformation of the system and developing teachers’ digital literacy is one way to achieve this. However, the central government does not decide what competencies teachers must acquire in their pre-service training as this decision falls within the remit of teacher training institutions that set their own curriculum – provided that it amounts to a master’s degree. TALIS data from 2018 show that using ICT for teaching featured in less than half (46%) of lower secondary teachers’ pre-service training in Iceland – a proportion 10 points below the OECD average. Similarly, the central government does not decide what competencies teachers must develop as part of their in-service training. In fact, only municipalities can impose standards on teacher recruitment. This prerogative gives them a key policy lever for cultivating teachers’ digital literacy as they can provide incentives towards certain types of training, such as training in teaching with digital technology. In the year 2017, 63% of teachers in Iceland reported that they took part in professional development in ICT skills, on par with the OECD average (60%). This was statistically more often the case in schools with a low proportion of disadvantaged students.
Another lever through which to foster students’ and – indirectly – teachers’ digital literacy is reform of the national curricula. In primary and lower secondary education, the curriculum has been updated to impose specific uses of digital technology in class and to integrate the development of student skills to use and understand digital technology as a learning outcome (both through a dedicated subject of study and as an interdisciplinary learning outcome); and upper secondary and VET curriculum will follow in the years to come. Municipalities can add their own guidelines to the national requirements.
Governance of data and digital technology in education
The European Union General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) applies to Iceland, a member of the European Economic Area. Translated into the national legislation under the 2018 Act on Data Protection and the Processing of Personal Data, it defines the largest part of Iceland’s regulation around the protection of data and privacy, although it is not specific to education.8
Beyond general rules on data protection and a few requirements integrated into curriculum requirements by the ministry, Iceland has issued other rules concerning the management of data and digital technology at the central level. There are rules to ensure a certain degree of data portability between pre-primary and primary schools so that personal information (in particular as regards possible students’ special needs) are well protected during the transfer. Other rules govern the access to, and use of, educational administrative data in upper secondary education and VET for public and private research, as long as full confidentiality can be ensured and that procedures comply with data protection laws.9 Municipalities do have the legal capacity to set up their own regulations on some other aspects that relate to data and digital technology, for instance to ensure equitable access to digital technologies for students in their schools through their own mechanisms; but in general, regulation at the local level is limited.
Supporting innovation and research and development (R-D) in digital education
Developing a national education technology ecosystem presents challenges both to develop appropriate local tools and to incentivise relevant innovation by external stakeholders. Providing incentives, supporting R-D, and funding education technology start-ups are part of the typical innovation portfolio countries could consider.
Iceland’s support for academic research is not focused on digital education. Anyone can access and use the aggregated education datasets that are publicly made available by Statistics Iceland. In upper secondary education and VET, access to and use of educational administrative data are even regulated to ensure equitable conditions for researchers; but those databases are not publicly documented, and they do not contain information specific to aspects of digital education.
The government has not set up mechanisms that would facilitate the use of education data and technology for R-D and, reciprocally, it does not prioritise R-D on digital technology and education data use over other fields of research. With Rannis, the Icelandic Centre for Research that manages a number of specialised research funds, like the Education Research Fund or the Icelandic Research Fund, the government commissions academic papers and coordinates research programmes on education but digital education is not a priority research area.
However, one of the funds, the Educational Materials Development Fund (“Þróunarsjóður námsgagna”), established in 2008 and coordinated by Rannis since 2013, is a key instrument for the central government to incentivise, guide and sponsor the development and release of both learning materials and education software by people and organisations, be they teachers, academics, freelance workers or publishing companies.10 Anyone can submit a project – provided that it is supported by digital technology and pertains to the curriculum of primary and secondary education – and apply for two types of grants, whose attribution is decided by the Fund’s board on a competitive basis. Beyond a first type of “general development grant” of up to EUR 12 500, every year the Fund’s board awards a “development and publication grant” (for up to EUR 25 000) to a maximum of two projects, subject to stricter criteria on their work plan, purpose, and use. Interestingly, the Funds’ allocation priorities vary from year to year: in 2023 for instance, increased consideration is given to learning materials focusing on i) Icelandic language for immigrants, ii) social and natural sciences, and iii) strengthening Icelandic vocabulary.
Iceland also engages with well-established EdTech companies to nurture innovation for education, notably by providing monetary (e.g. start-ups can submit a project to get grants from the Education Materials Development Fund mentioned above) as well as non-monetary incentives (e.g. co-organised events, fora) to support collaboration between schools and the EdTech sector. This responsibility was devolved to the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Innovation in 2022.
In its future activities, the central government envision to provide – or support the provision of – more advanced types of digital tools, such as a centralised online education platform and classroom analytics technology in primary and lower education, and a centralised system for student admission management that will be operable across all levels of education.
References
[1] OECD (2022), Mending the Education Divide Getting Strong Teachers to the Schools That Need Them Most, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/92b75874-en.
Notes
← 1. Compulsory School Act: https://www.government.is/media/menntamalaraduneyti-media/media/law-and-regulations/Compulsory-School-Act-No.-91-2008.pdf & Upper Secondary School Act: https://www.government.is/media/menntamalaraduneyti-media/media/law-and-regulations/Upper-Secondary-Education-Act-No.-92-2008.pdf
← 2. INNA: https://inna.is/
← 3. https://www.infomentor.is/um-okkur/ and https://namfus.is/#/
← 4. https://www.inna.is/framhaldsskolaumsokn/default.jsp
← 5. Examples of non-governmental study and career guidance websites: http://www.namogstorf.is/; http://www.næstaskref.is/; http://nemahvad.is/; http://www.mbl.is/vidskipti/fagfolkid/
← 7. TALIS : Mending the Education Divide: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/d8a3978a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/d8a3978a-en#section-d1e11602
← 8. 2018 Act on Data Protection and the Processing of Personal Data: https://www.personuvernd.is/media/uncategorized/Act_No_90_2018_on_Data_Protection_and_the_Processing_of_Personal_Data.pdf
← 9. Confidentiality procedures when accessing personal data: https://www.althingi.is/lagas/nuna/2008091.html
← 10. Educational Materials Development Fund: https://www.rannis.is/media/throunarsjodur-namsgagna/log_nr_71_2007.pdf and https://www.rannis.is/media/throunarsjodur-namsgagna/reglugerd_nr_1268_2007.pdf