Big Data in Education

“Big data” includes large, complex, diverse, and unstructured collections of data sets that cannot be easily parsed with common tools. These massive data sets are gathered by a range of technologies, including mobile devices. As data sets grow in size, so too must our ability and capacity to capture, store, analyze, search, visualize, and share information in its ever-increasing volume, variety, velocity, and complexity. - David Vogt

How big is big data to education? Along with its younger siblings—data mining, data visualization, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and learning analytics—big data is one of the most influential frontiers in education. One of the most compelling aspects of big data is its reach: this bird’s eye view of information is increasingly (re)shaping knowledge and knowledge production, technology and application development, education as a field of practice and research, and how public and private sectors seek to improve education as well as address its problems and challenges, both locally and internationally. - David Vogt

Big data is a huge key to machine learning. Big data allows machines to understand and process knowledge in a way that humans probably won't ever be capable of doing. How useful would it be to finally be able to tackle the question, can individual pasts predict future behavior in a systematic way? This would prove to be useful in areas of education such as student attraction, retention, and promotion.

Here are some other questions that can be addressed: can teachers finally be evaluated in an objective and systematic way that is informed by big data? When does privacy become an issue? Is it even an issue with how much we are actually willing to give away? Can big data inform standard educational practice? Or can big data help in segmenting student groups and personalising education?

I think big data in education space is still very pre-mature, with lots of room to tackle important questions that can improve the system as a whole. Are there risks? Certainly, but whenever a technology generates more questions than answers, it means there's something worth exploring.

If every class is an educator's iterative experiment anyways, why not incorporate big data the same way we're incorporating small data? (Excel sheets, attendance records, GPAs etc.)

Food for thought.