The BPM4ED project: Designing 21st century schools

The ways of schooling and teaching is quickly changing for the continuous evolution of the surrounding world: new forms of education are required; in fact, on the one side the birth of the smart cities and the smart community ask for active citizens interacting with institutions and on the other side the enormous potentiality of ICT is modifying both the learning environments and the training models. The so called ì21st century schoolsî, differ from the current ones in almost all the aspects: building architecture, furniture, teaching and learning methods and so on. This new kind of school are spreading all over Europe and the world and governments, which recognize the importance of an efficient, modern and up to date education system, are committed in the design and implementation of these new schools. Two problems make this scenario confusing, preventing an ordered development of this new kind of schools: first, the lack of theoretical models able to represent the ì21st century schoolî features; second, tools to manage and design these schools and their services and activities are, when they exist, based on the old paradigms (i.e., the traditional school with classrooms, etc.) and are not still integrated in an unique tool to support the overall school working and management. In this paper, the ongoing BPM4ED (Business Process Management for EDucation) research project is described: schools are seen as organizations and the business processes management techniques are used to analyze and classify them; the final and ambitious goals of the project are the development of a design methodology for ì21st century schoolsî and the definition, design and implementation of a new class of integrated tools, possibly including the existing ones, to manage all the school activities and services.