This note provides an overview of Denmark’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 Denmark 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 Denmark 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
6. Denmark
Abstract
Key features
The provision of digital infrastructure for education in Denmark is mainly a public responsibility divided between central and municipal governments. At the central level, the ministry provides a selection of digital tools for system management. At the local level, municipalities provide primary and lower secondary schools with digital tools for institutional management (e.g. learning management systems) or for teaching and learning purposes (e.g. all sorts of digital resources) that they (or their schools) procure from the EdTech market. In upper secondary education (including VET), schools themselves are responsible for procuring their digital management tools and learning resources.
Schools and teachers have a growing degree of autonomy in making choice about digital tools, from the ones publicly (centrally or locally) provided or from the private market. To some degree, the government supports and guides them in their procurement and imposes requirements and standards to ensure interoperability and security.
The Danish education system builds on high degrees of trust and interaction between public authorities and citizens, as well as on excellent hardware infrastructure. In this well-established digital environment and following the 2014 User Portal Initiative, the 2018 Supplementary Agreement and the 2021 Policy Agreement, the role of the central government as regards digitalisation in education has been shifting from that of a provider to that of an enabler. This suggests that the government has come to prioritise the enactment of rules and guidelines to ensure a coherent and harmonised uptake of digital technologies nationally, over the distribution of specific digital tools that municipalities and schools are better placed to acquire.
General policy context
Division of responsibility
In Denmark, the Ministry of Children and Education (hereinafter “the ministry”) is responsible for determining the policies and direction of the Danish education system. However, the governance of the education system is largely decentralised. Primary and lower secondary schools are funded and governed by Danish municipalities; while upper secondary schools and vocational education and training (VET) institutions are state-funded but self-governed.
Public responsibilities for providing access to, supporting the uptake of, and regulating the use of digital technologies in education follow this devolved context. Providing schools across all levels of education with access to digital tools for system management is mainly the ministry’s responsibility; but providing digital tools for institutional management as well as resources for teaching and learning is a responsibility delegated to Danish municipalities in primary and lower secondary education, and to institutions themselves in upper secondary and VET.
What is true of the provision of digital tools is also true of their regulation in Denmark. The Danish central government leaves a large room for manoeuvre to municipalities, or to schools themselves, to set local rules and guidelines that govern the access to, and use of, data and digital technologies in education.
Digital education strategy
In 2021, the Danish government published a Policy Agreement and invested around EUR 7 million into three main areas: raising students’ awareness about safety and security issues on the Internet; developing digital teaching resources; and fostering a healthy digital culture in schools.1
The 2021 Policy Agreement exemplifies the recent priorities of the Danish central government in terms of digitalisation in education, whereby it devolves more and more of the provision of digital infrastructure to other public authorities or to schools themselves. For instance, in the past five years, no significant change was made – at the central level – in the policy or expenditures for hardware infrastructure (e.g. broadband connection in schools, digital devices for students). The hardware infrastructure is already well established in Denmark, with 97% of the 16-74 year-olds having access to the Internet at home, and 100% of businesses. Upgrading this infrastructure, or maintaining it, is a responsibility that the ministry devolves to municipalities locally.
Beyond the education sector, the central government’s strategy is to ensure a coherent uptake and use of digital technology across different policy areas and levels of government. In 2010, it has set up the Danish Agency for Governmental IT Services within the Ministry of Finance to that effect. The Agency is responsible for operating an effective digital support service and for ensuring a high quality and consistent digital service across the whole Danish government.2
The public digital education infrastructure
In 2014, the central government and Local Government Denmark (representative of the Danish municipalities) agreed upon a financial model for implementing a public “User Portal Initiative”.3 This initiative clarified the roles and responsibilities of the ministry and municipalities in setting up a public digital infrastructure in primary and lower secondary education, on the principle that local governments were better placed to meet the needs of end-users (teachers, students, parents). This initiative aimed at: building an “integration platform” as a single interface between the municipalities’ learning management systems and the state’s databases; setting up public interoperability standards for data exchange (e.g. IEEE LOM for metadata, Common Cartridge for learning resources, LTI for exam results); and making some educational data openly available to provide opportunities for vendors to create innovative products.
As a result of the 2014 User Portal Initiative and in line with the devolution of responsibility in education, the central government and municipalities share public responsibilities for providing a public digital infrastructure in education; and schools can choose to acquire further tools from private companies or use free materials from external stakeholders such as philanthropists, education publishers, EdTech and non-EdTech companies, universities, teachers, and teacher unions.4
This section reviews two aspects of the public digital infrastructure in Denmark: 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 systems
The Danish ministry does not centrally maintain a student information system (SIS). The ministry used to use and provide its own system for VET and private institutions, EASY-A, which integrated the functionalities of a student information system and an administrative function system in schools. However, in June 2021 the ministry closed this system and asked all municipalities to equip schools with a market supplied system to manage their administrative operations, and report back to the central administration and other public authorities.5 To make sure that schools’ substitute tools match with the data standards of the central student register as EASY-A did, the ministry has set up a list of several approved learning management systems from which municipalities and schools can choose from.6
Although the government stopped operating a student information system, the agreement reached in the 2015 User Portal Initiative stipulated that it would set up a common interface to integrate and connect the various schools’ learning management systems and facilitate all mandatory data transfers into the government’s central registers. All this is done through the portal of the National Agency for IT and the Learning’s Knowledge Base that acts as a one-stop shop for school staff.7 The Knowledge Base portal lists the digital tools provided by the government for system management, indicates to what extent (fully or in part only) the use of those tools to report data is compulsory for schools, and provides step-by-step guidance on data transfers – as well as information on other educational matters. Data are then aggregated to compute statistics that are displayed online at Uddannelsesstatistik (“Education Statistics”).8
Admission and guidance
The central government maintains a student admission management system, Optagelse (“Admission”).9 Students use it to apply for upper secondary education, VET, and higher education institutions. All relevant information are then transferred from Optagelse to institutions’ education management systems so that they can review and select applications. Optagelse is not powered by algorithms yet, but automated decision-making is being developed and should be rolled out in Optagelse in some parts of the country by 2024. Municipalities also use a digital system for enrolment in primary and lower secondary schools that digitises enrolment procedures in a simplification effort. The enrolment process is not competitive.
To help students navigate their studies, submit applications to the student admission management system and find their future career, the ministry has set up a platform for career and study guidance called UddannelsesGuiden (“Education Guide” in English). It is available for students at all levels of education.10
Finally, VET students can use the Lærepladsen (“Apprenticeship”) platform to find an apprenticeship in companies that are approved by the ministry.
Exams and assessments
The ministry manages three digital systems to support the administration of assessments: Testogprøver (“Tests and trials”) in primary and lower secondary education, Netprøver (“Online Tests”) in secondary education, and XPRS in upper secondary education (specifically for exams).11 In Netprøver for instance, students can work with centrally managed written assessments online. Netprøver automatically checks students’ submissions for plagiarism, assigns them grading by appointed examiners, and transfers students’ grades to their schools’ learning management system.
Those systems also support the administration of online student evaluations. In primary and lower secondary education, since 2022 the ministry has implanted the Folkeskolen's National Test (“Primary schools’ national test”), which will pave the way for the larger-scale development and implementation of the Folkeskolen's National Skills Test by the 2026-27 school year. This new compulsory online student evaluation will be assessing students’ competencies in reading and mathematics. Compared with the former adaptive national evaluation, in which the questions difficulty adapted in real time to student performance, the upcoming Folkeskolen's National Skills Test will be linear: all students will be asked the same questions in the same order. This reversal on adaptive assessment followed complaints from education researchers, from politicians on both sides of the political spectrum and from parts of the public opinion. The former, adaptive national evaluation will remain available on a voluntary basis in a variety of disciplines until the 2025/26 school year, including biology, geography, chemistry, physics, English and Danish as a second language.
Finance, administration, and communication management
In primary and lower secondary education, the ministry provides schools with Centralt Økonomi- og StudieAdministrativt (CØSA, “Central Finance and Study Administration”), a digital administrative system used for computing central subsidies received by municipalities to fund their schools, based on data about their educational operations, student enrolments and activities. CØSA allows the quarterly updated payment of municipal subsidies. In upper secondary and VET institutions, the publicly provided Navision Stat serves the role of a digital administrative system. CØSA and Navision Stat are provided to facilitate specific data transfers between schools’ and their corresponding authorities. Although they allow for a certain degree of integration with schools’ learning management systems, they are not intended to be used as a comprehensive student information system by the ministry.
Consecutive to the division of responsibility envisioned in the 2014 User Portal Initiative, municipalities were also tasked with the development and maintenance of the Aula platform. Built and implemented in 2019 in collaboration with KOMBIT, the municipalities’ joint IT organisation, Aula operates as the primary customer relationship management system (that is, communication tool) for millions of students, parents, and school staff in primary and lower secondary education in Denmark.12 It has been progressively adopted by more than 1 700 primary schools (and over 4 000 day-care providers) and emerges now as a uniform system across institutions and municipalities. Its scalable data processing infrastructure runs through Amazon Web Service and meets all local authorities’ data protection measures. With its massive uptake, government officials reckon that Aula has encouraged EdTech firms to raise their transparency standards so that their products could be connected with Aula.
Digital ecosystem for teaching and learning
Danish municipalities have a large degree of autonomy in providing digital resources for teaching and learning to schools. There are only few examples where this responsibility falls upon the central government.
Most of the centrally provided digital resources for teaching and learning are curated on Emu, the ministry’s online platform for learning and for teacher development that covers all levels of educations.13 On Emu, teacher and educational staff can find teaching resources and activities, examples of good pedagogical practices, open educational resources in different formats (text, audio, or video), as well as templates for research papers, articles, and courses, and legal guidelines about copyright for image and video materials or accessibility requirements, for example. All those resources are openly provided, and so is the social media channel maintained by the ministry, which notably broadcasts podcasts as educational resources.14
For students, the ministry openly provides self-assessment resources such as those curated as sample exercises from the National Tests. It also maintains Prøvebanken (“Test bank”), a digital bank of assessments that students can access to test their skills and knowledge on exams and assignments from 2010 on in various subjects at all levels of education.15 The latter is accessed through a single sign-on service rather than openly.
Other than that, municipalities can provide their schools with additional learning resources, virtual classroom environments or other digital tools for teaching and learning. The “Teachers Digital Everyday” report helps school staff explore what types of digital tools and resources are used by their peers.16
When publicly provided, whether by the ministry or by the municipalities, those digital tools are generally accessible through a single sign on (SSO) service called UNI login. Its development and expansion were allotted to the central government in the 2014 User Portal Initiative.17
Access, use and governance of digital technologies and data in education
Providing a public digital education infrastructure or funding to use digital resources does not necessarily imply that stakeholders will use them. Different rules and policies can therefore ensure access to digital technologies in education, as well as support and govern their use.
Ensuring access and supporting use
Equity of access
In Denmark, 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 (rural or urban, public or private, etc.) are targeted as a policy priority. Data collected by the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) study across the 2017/18 school year provide some evidence of the equity of access to digital infrastructure across Denmark. Whether you compare Danish schools by socio‑economic status, type (public or private) or location (city or rural area), the difference in the level of teachers’ use and self‑efficacy with ICT or the prevalence of ICT equipment in schools, are either statistically non‑significant or far lower than in most other OECD countries. On average, 90% of Danish lower secondary teachers report that they frequently or always let students use ICT in their learning (compared to 53% on average in the OECD); 88% feel that they can support student learning through the use of ICT (67% on average in the OECD); and only 13% of principals reckon that their school’s capacity to provide school instruction is hindered by a shortage or inadequacy of digital technology for instruction (25% on average in the OECD).
Supporting the use of digital tools and resources
To expand the digital education ecosystem beyond the tools that it directly provides (e.g. the student admission management system, the bank of (self-) assessment tools, the online platform for teacher development), the ministry delegates the procurement of digital tools to municipalities. In those cases, it provides them with certain amount of funding agreed upon the 2014 User Portal Initiative, and sometimes with a list of recommended tools to choose from. This followed a EUR 67 million investment made in 2011 to support the use of digital tools and resources in education. When schools themselves want (or need) to equip themselves with additional digital tools, the ministry grants permission on a case‑by‑case basis (through the SKI platform described below). In the latter case, the ministry imposes criteria with regard to security as per Systemrevisionsbekendtgørelsen (“system audit executive order”), a 2021 legal order on requirements for digital tools used in education.18
In Denmark, Statens og Kommunernes Indkøbsservice A/S (SKI, or in English “State and Municipal Purchasing Service”) is an agency mandated by the government to streamline and professionalise public procurement across sectors. It was founded in 1994 as a limited company and co-owned by the Danish government and Local Government Denmark.19 Out of the approximately EUR 49 billion that the Danish public sector spends every year to purchase goods and services from private companies, 2.5% are made through SKI (that is, EUR 1.2 billion). In education as much as in other sectors, the aim is to secure good quality products and services at better prices and conditions than each individual public organisation (e.g. schools) can obtain alone. At the local level, KOMBIT provides municipalities with further guidance on the procurement of digital tools and help them negotiate with vendors for better prices and quality.
To support the use of those tools in educational institutions, the ministry may impose the use of certain tools, whether it itself provides them (see the student admission management system for instance) or not (see the learning management systems, purchased by municipalities and schools). The ministry also provides central guidance (for instance, through the ministry’s support website when related to publicly provided tools, or through the SKI platform when procured from private companies) at all levels of education, as well as local guidance for education levels it is responsible for, in the form of workshops in VET and adult learning institutions.20 The ministry has also set up financial incentives for adult learning institutions to use distance learning tools with the objective to strengthen the attractivity and flexibility of adult learning.21
Finally, the ministry monitors and evaluates the use of digital tools in schools. The Danish Evaluation Institute (EVA), established in 1999 to succeed the Evaluation Centre which existed since 1992, serves as an independent state institution under the ministry of education to explore and evaluate the quality of schools at all educational levels. Among other areas of interest, EVA carries out quality evaluation on pedagogies and innovative pedagogical methods, including the monitoring of the uptake of digital tools in schools.
Cultivating the digital literacy of education stakeholders
In Denmark, VET teachers must acquire certain competencies regarding the use of digital technologies for teaching in their pre‑service training. This is a requirement imposed nationally by the central government as a way to implement the national curriculum at all levels of education. The new legal corpus imposes the use of specific digital technologies in class and establishes the development of student skills to use and understand digital technologies as a key educational objective.
Beyond teachers, Denmark seeks to engage its whole population with the digitalisation of education. The Danish government therefore involves students and their parents in government-supported projects to foster a healthy digital culture in schools and raises awareness around the use of digital technology in education. These are two pillars of the 2021 Policy Agreement that refined Denmark’s digital strategy in education.
Governance of data and digital technology in education
The Danish government has set up rules that regulate the access to, and use of, data and digital technologies in education. Although some of those rules, as well as guidelines, emanate from the central ministry, many are at the discretion of the municipalities. For instance, setting up rules about equitable access to, and use of, digital technologies in education, in particular for official exams, is the central government’s responsibility. However, it falls to lower levels of government to regulate or guide the possible use of digital proctoring methods or automated decision-making systems (within the general legal framework for data protection described below) – although they are seldom used.
As is the case across EU countries, the largest part of Denmark’s regulation around the protection of data and privacy, in education as well as in other sectors, is a transposition in national law of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR). The Danish National Agency for IT and Learning provide support to apply the EU GDPR in the education system, but it is mainly the municipalities and schools’ responsibility to ensure compliance with data protection regulation. Additional rules exist, though, in line with the particularities of the Danish digital infrastructure in education. For instance, the online student evaluations come with specific regulation on privacy and data protection. Also, there exist further rules around the protection of staff data, who are protected as other employees by the 2019 National Economy Agreement – and by additional rules set up by municipalities.22 Finally, the Danish government has set up rules and guidelines about accessing and using educational administrative data for public or private research and development (more details at the end of this section).
As the use of automated decision-making tools and AI-based tools in education remains limited, there is no specific policy effort at the central level to regulate these aspects. As of December 2023, neither are there central-level rules or guidelines about the accountability, effectiveness, transparency, bias of algorithmic models or automated systems, other than what the EU GDPR imposes (that is, nothing). However, the municipalities can implement rules or guidelines at their discretion (about minimal standards of performance of the digital technologies that they procure to their schools, for instance). According to ministry officials, such municipal regulation remained marginal as of 2023.
The ministry is the primary public authority that enacts rules and guidelines to promote increasing data portability and interoperability between the different tools that compose the Danish digital education infrastructure. Systemrevisionsbekendtgørelsen (“system audit executive order), a legal order enacted in 2021 that also regulated some aspects of procurement, imposes rules and requirements on the use of open standards on educational technologies and data, as well as on the use of specific technical standards, all of which are enacted to improve interoperability of the tools used across municipalities at different levels of education. Examples of requirements include that the chosen system must feature “appropriate controls for the allocation, follow-up, maintenance and withdrawal of access rights to systems and data, as well as logical access controls that limit the risk of unauthorised access to systems or data”, or that “the system supplier has established procedures that ensure that the SA system complies with applicable interfaces and that management of communication takes place in accordance with applicable interface descriptions”.23 Another way for the ministry to ensure interoperability in the digital ecosystem is to limit the schools’ choice to a list of pre-approved tools, as in the case of learning management systems mentioned above. As in most other OECD countries, these efforts were accompanied by the implementation of a single sign‑on service (UNI Login).
Supporting innovation and research and development (R‑D) in digital education
Developing a national education technology ecosystem is a challenge for local tools to be developed. Providing incentives, supporting R-D, funding education technology start-ups are part of the typical innovation portfolio countries could consider.
In the past five years, the ministry has commissioned research on topics directly or indirectly related to the use of digital technologies, to improve learning outcomes and assessments, support teaching, and help students with special needs. In parallel to this commissioning, the ministry releases documentation on its public administrative datasets to facilitate the use of education data. For instance, the Danish Evaluation Institute (EVA) is mandated with the mission to provide actionable data on education to both public and private research organisations.
The Danish government also monitors the uptake of digital technology through various studies. Most notably, the ministry conducted a quantitative survey in 2021 to map teachers’ daily experience with digital tools.24 The questionnaires were sent to representative samples of primary school teachers and principals. Acknowledging the low response rates, the survey found that 64% of teachers consider they have at least some influence on the choice of digital resources purchased by municipalities; and 76% are satisfied with this level of influence. Virtually all teachers consider that those digital resources are of good quality (92%), but some also find their provision insufficient (40%). In the same year, Denmark also participated in a study of the International Association for the Evaluation of Student Achievement (IEA) to assess changes in teachers’ use of digital tools during the COVID‑19 pandemic. The ministry partnered with researchers from Aarhus University, the second largest university of the country, to carry out the study. The result showed lesser amplitude of change in Denmark than in other countries, due to the already deeply integrated digital culture.25
As the Danish central and local governments partly rely on private EdTech companies to provide some of the building blocks of schools’ digital infrastructure, the ministry and its agencies have secured public-private relationships that aim to mobilise innovations in education. These efforts mostly consist in non‑monetary incentives. For instance, the ministry supports the collaboration between EdTech companies and educational institutions by organising conferences (e.g. the Digitaliseringsdage [“Digitisation days”] conference) that bring together teachers, publishers and other relevant (private) partners, sometimes members of the EdTech Denmark association.26 The ministry no longer invests in start‑up companies working on EdTech tools, but it continues to incentivise research and development to encourage EdTech innovation through competitive educational grants.
In terms of future priorities, in software as much as in hardware infrastructure, the central government will continue to review, for each type of digital tool, whether it should provide this infrastructure centrally or entrust municipalities (and schools themselves) to acquire it from the private sector, with the guidance and supervision of a central authority. As is the case in other Nordic countries, the Danish government’s role is willing to shift from a provider to an enabler, whereby it sets the conditions for engaging all stakeholders in the digitalisation of education.
Notes
← 1. 2021 New Policy Agreement: https://www.uvm.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/uvm/2021/dec/211206-ny-aftale-skal-styrke-boern-og-unges-digitale-dannelse
← 2. Agency for Governmental IT services: https://statens-it.dk/english/ & https://www.dga.or.th/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/file_dff0e1173ce315d0a824c2236d78b943.pdf
← 3. 2015 User Portal Initiative: http://lre.eun.org/edrene/seminars/012/1374.pdf
← 4. See for instance: Corona – Gode råd til undervisning | emu danmarks læringsportal
← 5. The closure of EASY-A: https://www.stil.dk/administration-og-infrastruktur/frit-valg-af-studieadministrative-systemer/markedsgoerelsen
← 6. List of approved learning management systems: https://www.stil.dk/administration-og-infrastruktur/studieadministrative-systemer/til-uddannelsesinstitutioner/godkendte-studieadministrative-systemer
← 7. The Knowledge Base: https://viden.stil.dk
← 8. Uddannelsesstatistik: https://uddannelsesstatistik.dk/pages/Vejledning_statistik.aspx
← 9. Optagelse: https://www.optagelse.dk/
← 10. UddannelsesGuiden: https://www.ug.dk/
← 11. Testogprøver: https://xn--testogprver-ngb.dk/; Netprøver: https://www.uvm.dk/gymnasiale-uddannelser/proever-og-eksamen/tilrettelaeggelse-og-afholdelse-af-proever/netproever/om-netproever; XPRS: https://www.stil.dk/administration-og-infrastruktur/systemrevision-af-studieadministrative-systemer/integrationer-og-gaeldende-graensefladebeskrivelser
← 12. Aula: https://aulainfo.dk/wp-content/uploads/Aula-foraeldrefolder-Gladsaxe-engelsk.pdf and https://www.netcompany.com/int/cases/Kombit-Aula and KOMBIT: https://kombit.dk/aboutkombit
← 13. EMU: https://www.emu.dk/
← 14. Social media channel: emu - Danmarks læringsportal | Facebook; BØRNEHØJDE på Apple Podcasts
← 15. Prøvebanken: https://www.xn--prvebanken-1cb.dk/
← 16. Teachers Digital Everyday: https://www.uvm.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/uvm/2021/maj/210517-ny-kortlaegning-en-velfungerende-digital-hverdag-med-plads-til-forbedring
← 17. UNI Login: https://mit.uni-login.dk
← 18. Systemrevisionsbekendtgørelsen: https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/2022/725
← 20. Ministry’s Agency for IT and Learning’s Support website: https://www.stil.dk/support
← 21. Adult distance learning: https://www.uvm.dk/trepart/trepart-om-voksen-og-efteruddannelse/%C3%A9n-indgang-til-voksen-og-efteruddannelsestilbuddene/trepartsaftalens-initiativer-til-digitalisering-af-veu/forsoeg-med-veu-godtgoerelse-ved-fuld-fjernundervisning-i-amu
← 22. 2019 National Economy Agreement: https://www.regeringen.dk/aktuelt/publikationer-og-aftaletekster/aftale-om-kommunernes-oekonomi-for-2019/
← 23. Requirements on procurements: https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/2023/476
← 24. Quantitative mapping of teachers’ digital everyday life (2021): https://www.uvm.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/uvm/2021/maj/210517-ny-kortlaegning-en-velfungerende-digital-hverdag-med-plads-til-forbedring
← 25. ICILS Teacher Panel (2021): https://projekter.au.dk/icils/icils-teacher-panel/
← 26. EdTech Denmark promotes collaboration and gain from the development and use of digital technology in education: https://edtechdenmark.dk/ / Example of cross-sector conferences: https://www.digidage.dk/om-digitaliseringsdage