The cybersecurity industry faces a significant skills gap, with a shortage of qualified professionals to meet the growing demand for cyber talent. Although there is a wide variety of cybersecurity professional trainings available, these trainings use different approaches and the certificates obtained are not compatible with each other. Contrary to the United States, there is no European Authority responsible for approving these trainings. The situation becomes even more complex when considering sector-specific trainings. This paper sheds light on the certification landscape regarding relevant, organisations and bodies at the international and European level. The standards, the criteria, and the processes regarding professional certifications are discussed. The manuscript concludes with a proposal of a sector-agnostic schema for a cybersecurity professional training programme.

The challenge of connecting and combining sustainability with ICT education is crucial for enhancing transformative learning toward sustainable development (SD). This enhancement can be achieved through integrating aspects of sustainability issues into ICT curricula. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that the ICT teachers possess the necessary knowledge, understanding, skills, and values to enable the inclusion of sustainability education in their learning practices. In this direction, this study explores the Greek ICT teachers’ perceptions and perceived barriers toward embedding sustainability into the secondary education ICT curricula. For this reason, secondary school ICT teachers completed an online questionnaire concerning education for SD and its implementation in the ICT field. Their responses revealed that the ICT teachers have a rather deficient level of understanding and awareness about the concept of sustainability and green informatics. On the other hand, the findings indicated that the ICT teachers have a positive perception toward the inclusion of green informatics into the ICT secondary curricula. They highlighted the need to implement a teacher's training ICT module that is geared towards integrating education for SD across the secondary ICT curricula within the Greek educational system. In addition, they suggested the provision of educational sustainability-related content (books, scientific journals, etc.) at schools.

The work addresses the significance of robotics in education, emphasizing its role in enhancing STEM skills through programming and sensory feedback. Scratch, a multimedia programming environment, is highlighted as a tool for robotic projects. Within Scratch, this work discusses data representation, distinguishing between visible and transparent data, focusing on transparent data. To evaluate how data are used in Scratch by novice programmers, this work also proposes an evaluation framework using the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) taxonomy.

Empowering young adults to protect our planet starts in their school era and moves forward to the community. By engaging pupils in sustainability-based learning, they become environmentally conscious young people. In order to explore pupils' knowledge of sustainability and the intention to deal with “Green Informatics” in Greece, we collected pupils-generated data from learning activities and conducted a research via a questionnaire after delivering a computer science course. The course was based on the Moodle platform, where pupils engaged in sustainability. The results indicate the pupils' positive perceptions related to green informatics and the integration of sustainability into the CS curricula. These results highlight the necessity for redesigning the primary and secondary education curricula in order to increase pupils' sustainability and environmental awareness. In addition, the pupils suggest the introduction of awareness activities in an inclusive manner so that these activities may provide a learning path towards environmental sustainability for the whole school community.

Robotics is being increasingly used in order to engage pupils in STEM, in which computer programing can also be taught. This paper, as part of a larger research approach within Robotics and STEM where visual programming languages are used and proposes a set of evaluation criteria on data assessment in Scratch based on the SOLO taxonomy. The data evaluation is influenced by their form, the types and symbolism of their content, the ways in which they are used, their actors, their degree of visibility, the organization of simple and multimedia data, their processing, and their naming. The types and symbolism of their content, as well as the ways in which they are used, are investigated in this work. For each considered factor, a categorization is made using the SOLO taxonomy levels. The teachers can use this categorization as a tool to either assess their students' performance using quantifiable criteria (in matters pertaining to the factors mentioned above) or to create their own teaching paths, thereby building a mental scaffolding that aids in the efficient and effective learning of new material.

According to Wirth, “a program is algorithm plus data”. This association of algorithm and data also occurs at the micro-scale of a command, where the program is represented by a single command plus a data representation. This paper proposes to map the degrees of complexity of the command, data processing and data structuring to the levels of the SOLO taxonomy in order to create tool for evaluating code which is used in visual programming environments. This tool allows the teacher to assess the degree of the student’s understanding of the use of a command, and the complexity of that command. The ability of the teacher to measure the weight of each command, allows him to design alternative teaching spiral paths, from a simple command to the most complex ones. The work in this paper is part of a broader project to evaluate visual programming code – with Scratch as the chosen visual programming language.

In this paper we present some important factors affecting peer assessment of student presentations in a graduate course. The course was titled “Advanced Information Systems” and was offered during the autumn semester of the academic year 2015-16 by the University of Piraeus. The sixty-one postgraduate students taking the course participated in this research. Students cooperated in groups of two or three in order to present a topic selected from a textbook relevant to the material that had already been taught in the class. Participants had to attend their peers' presentations and assess them using a single-page questionnaire. The questionnaire contained 19 closed five-point Likert scale questions plus some demographic questions. This peer assessment was also compared to the instructor's assessment who used the same questionnaire. The research revealed that: a) students' grades span a very narrow range in the grading scale (0-5), i.e., from 3.5 to 4.5; b) male students graded their peers more generously (higher) than female students; c) elder students graded their peers more generously than younger students; d) peer assessment grades did not depend on whether the students had to make a presentation or they had to do a simulation project; e) students who had already presented graded their peers more generously than those who had not presented yet; and finally, f) students gave different grades to the members of each group.

This paper aims to investigate, classify and establish appropriate benchmarks for visual programming codes. For the present study we have relied on the use of the Scratch-2 visual programming language. Scratch-2 is very popular as an introductory programming language at primary education and at the first years of secondary education in Greece. Initially, an evaluation framework, named VPLEF (Visual Programming Languages Evaluation Framework), is constructed based on several selected criteria. Since the observation of the visual code is not easy in the programming environment, we adopted the codOrama tool for a more consistent representation of the Sctrach-2 codes, aiming to identify the code characteristics, which were then associated with the evaluation criteria. We focuson the evaluation criteria of user interactivity, communication and parallelism-linearity of VPLEF and on two groups of commands, namely on “Control” and Event”, in conjunction with the system arguments. The study of the aforementioned entities leads us to a set of specified relationships of each of these three criteria with the command/argument combinations. Finally, an evaluation process is proposed to quantify the contribution of each combination to a specific criterion.

Block-Based Programming Environments (BBPE) are an emerging way for teaching programming in individuals with minimum programming skills. In such environments, blocks are used to represent instructions and learners construct programs by snapping these blocks together. However, there are not any satisfactory research data in the literature related to how learners perceive the utility of this approach and the evaluation of BBPE in middle school classrooms. Moreover, there exists a great interest in Physical Computing using Blockly@rduino which is a widely used visual programming editor. This paper aims at applying the Blocks for @rduino in the Students' Educational (B@SE) Process as a school project that will last up to three years starting in the current school year with the first class middle-school and continue with the same students for the next two years.

In this paper, we extend previous work on the use of ontologies as a tool in teaching geometry. As ontologies gather the information in a well-organized form, where relations between geometrical objects are exposed and explained, we took advantage of the properties of the circle's central and inscribed angles, we connected them to the notion of the right angled triangle and created the liaison between the two ontologies of the circle and the right angled triangle. The students undertook activities that allowed them to observe, cooperate, speculate, verify and connect geometrical meanings with mathematical concepts. This process allowed the students to realize that mathematics is a subject worthy of exploration and not just the memorization of properties of a geometrical object.

In this paper we explore ways that the semantic web may provide a different perspective on the educational process in the field of Mathematics. First, we present a general overview of ontologies and the use of the semantic web in the field of mathematics. Then, we analyze a particular geometry problem using semantics, and we point out the added value of semantics to the teaching process in comparison to the traditional teaching techniques. Finally, we present the applicability of the presented concept in a wider setting within the education procedures.

This paper describes a file storage service for elearning platforms using object oriented logic in a cloud computing environment. The service can be used by an academic community giving users the ability to store remotely and access their personal files with no security compromises. The Learning Research Management (LRM) innovative system is introduced and a technological assessment of this system is proposed and implemented using a statistical evaluation process. The conducted process is based on the perceptions from using the system by the involved student population. This process leads to an iterative decision making phase to further improve the system.

Unisuite is an integrated suite of applications for the creation and management of e-learning. It consists of three state-of-the-art stand-alone entities, Unibook, Uniboard and UniPM, which communicate via smart interfaces. In this paper, the techntechnological and operational innovationsical characteristics of Unisuite are presented. The technological and operational innovations are analyzed and potential extensions and improvements are presented.

In this paper, an integrated framework is proposed which covers synchronous and asynchronous education using several Web 2.0 tools and which takes into account several existing principles, views and strategies. Furthermore, this framework embeds self-evaluation mechanisms that are based on the performance of students, on answers to appropriately structured questionnaires and on the on-line monitoring of the supporting platform's parameters.