One in four survey respondents said investing in Big Data was “very effective,” compared to 62 percent who said technology-related on-campus teaching and learning investments were effective.
Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project, said higher education has lagged behind the corporate and government sectors in collecting and analyzing Big Data.
“Presidents and provosts have acknowledged they don’t do a very good job of using data for decision making,” Green said at the 2013 EDUCAUSE conference. “Having said that, there are areas on campus that do [use data effectively],” such as admissions and developments offices and food service departments. These departments “live in the world of data metrics,” he said, so they are more apt to use data to drive their practices.
A panel of Big Data experts expressed concern about the sky-high expectations for analytics in higher education, as some have pointed to Big Data as a transformational way of understanding teaching and learning.
Big Data may be transformational, the panelists said, but expecting that transformation to be immediate is unfair to campus technologists charged with compiling the mass amounts of information that can help steer students toward a degree.
“There’s no single algorithm that is going to predict everybody or a set of variables that is going to be able to predict everything,” said EDUCAUSE panelist Sherry Woosley, associate director of institutional effectiveness at Ball State University. “It’s complicated work. It’s messy, which is not what they taught me in stats class.”
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