“The major problem with student retention is that faculty, the provost office, and other support staff at the universities certainly don’t have a lot of visibility into what’s going on with students’ lives,” he said.
A professor may see a student’s grades are slipping, but may not know the root cause. Is there something on her brain that the university can help with besides extra academic help? Is she overworked outside of class? Is she taking too many classes at once? Is she about to lose her financing?
Bimson said he envisions a system that brings together seemingly disparate data on student life to form a clearer picture of what’s going on.
Many universities do already try to collect this information, but compiling and understanding it can be difficult. The University of Mexico uses detailed surveys to understand its student body, but while the simple multiple choice components can be easily parsed as a data set, properly analyzing the 30,000 written responses is a challenge.
One of ISS’s specialties, Bimson said, is the ability to also analyze unstructured data such as text, like those survey responses. Taking software used for counterterrorism efforts and applying it to students, however, does come with its own set of challenges.
“The main issue is protecting personal data,” Bimson said. “The Snowden Effect is impacting everyone and for good reason. So how do we get the right kind of data without prescribing it to individuals, and how do we protect them?”
The software company’s decades of experience already working with sensitive information may help set the company apart from other education Big Data ventures in that regard, but Bimson said he knows ISS is entering a crowded field.
“It’s a good area and one that’s clearly important, and we won’t be the only players,” he said. “But we see it as a very fertile ground and something, as a company, we feel is extremely important to the nation.”
Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake.
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