Smartness of Learning Ecosystems and its bottom-up emergence in six European Campuses

Each year a considerable amount of money is spent on the production
of several national and international University rankings that may deeply
influence the students’ enrollment. However, all such rankings are based almost
exclusively on numerical indicators weakly related to the quality of the learning
process and do not consider the perceptions of the “end users”: the learners.
Recently, as part of the activity promoted by the Observatory on the Smart City
Learning, we have produced an alternative approach to benchmark the learning
ecosystems based on the satisfaction of the needs described by the Maslow’s
Pyramid and on the achievement of the state of “flow” by the actors involved in
the learning processes. Here we report on the first validation of such a
benchmarking approach that has been tested in six European Campuses
involving more than 800 students. The critical analysis of the outcomes allowed
us, among other results, to identify the set of the most relevant indicators out of
those that were initially proposed and the identification of a “smartness” axis on
the plan of the first two principal components derived from a Principal
Component Analysis (PCA) applied to the collected data.