Learning Analytics, Educational Data Mining, Adaptive Learning

As Laurie Miles, head of analytics for big data specialist SAS, says: "The term big data has been around for decades, and we've been doing analytics all this time. It's not big, it's just bigger."

But it's the velocity, variety and volume of data that has merited the new term.

At a conference devoted to exploring Big Data in higher education, the event’s keynote speaker had a surprisingly contrarian take on the subject.

“Big Data is bull—,” Harper Reed, the chief technology officer of President Obama’s 2012 campaign, said to an audience that included many campus IT officials hoping to learn more about Big Data’s benefits.

Reed, who used the power of data to help Obama secure reelection, said the term is just a marketing tool meant to drive college and university IT officials toward expensive technologies for storing and analyzing data.

The collection of data in higher education will never produce a single formula for success, no matter how much students clamor for such a miracle algorithm.

That, along with other harsh realities of data collection and analysis on college campuses, was discussed during the “Allure of Big Data” session at the EDUCAUSE 2013 conference in Anaheim, Calif., where campus technologists from across the world gathered to discuss trends in educational technology.

EDUCAUSE Review Online

When education investors talk about so-called adaptive learning, in which a computer tailors instructional software personally for each student, the name Knewton invariably surfaces. The ed-tech start up began five years ago as an online test prep service. But it transformed the personalization technology it uses for test prep classes into a “recommendations” engine that any software publisher or educational institution can use. Today the New York City company boasts it can teach you almost any subject better and faster than a traditional class can. At the end of 2012, 500,000 students were using its platform. By the end of this year, the company estimates it will be more than 5 million. By next year, 15 million students. Most users will be unaware that Knewton’s big data machine is the hidden engine inside the online courses provided by Pearson or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt or directly by a school, such as Arizona State University and University of Alabama.

The Hechinger Report talked with David Kuntz, Knewton’s vice president of research, to understand how the company’s adaptive learning system works. Kuntz hails from the testing industry. He previously worked at Education Testing Service (ETS), which makes the GRE and administers the SAT for The College Board. Before that Kuntz worked for the company that makes the LSAT law school exam.

Presentation for LAK13 open online course

Higher education is overflowing with data to be parsed and analyzed but a data-related skills gap could stand in the way of analytics' potential.

How Can Data Mining and Analytics Enhance Education Infographic answers how can educational data mining & learning analytics improve and personalize education.

This second part in an eCampus News series about the power and pitfalls of Big Data examines the criticism and skepticism surrounding the buzz words.

Out of the two professors who taught the course, one had significantly lower performing students. But this was a professor who had won several teaching awards and was well-respected by campus leaders.

What was going on here, the researchers wondered as they sifted through all of the data points at their disposal.

They could only draw one conclusion based on the data at hand: the poorer student performance was because the professor was not the level of teacher everyone believed him to be.

The conclusion, it turns out, was wrong.

Two colleges tap into the power of big data and analytics to help improve student success.