Will Big Data ‘equalize’ education?


By 2018, “the classroom will learn you,” IBM researchers predicted in their annual list of five innovations that will occur in the next half-decade, some with a major impact on education.

big-data-education
Educational best practices may get a boost from data analytics.

The researchers said a boom in data-driven digital resources shouldn’t have professors worried, however. It’s not about replacing instructors, said Chalapathy Neti, director of Education Transformation at IBM Research, but making classrooms more equal across the board.

Think of it as institutions buying a “best educator in a box,” Neti said.

“It’s a tool that helps educators,” he said. “It’s equalizing. There are educators who are really good at their jobs that come up with their own mechanisms and come up with incredible results. What we’re trying do is box that up so everyone can become as good as the best teacher.”

Specifically, IBM is experimenting with using digital tools that will glean information from the students using those tool to learn.

At Gwinnett County Public Schools, the largest school system in Georgia, IBM is using Big Data and learning analytics to track the learning speed, competencies, and styles of the system’s students.

The project, called Personalized Education Through Analytics on Learning Systems, or PETALS, combines this individual information with data collected over the last decade from 200,000 anonymous students.

“Using the student model and using that historical data, we’re able to predict student performance with very high accuracy,” Neti said. “We can identify at-risk learners before certain patterns set it. It’s similar to healthcare. If a disease has progressed too much, it’s very hard to anything about it. It’s the same with learning styles.”

While IBM’s project is limited to K-12 students for now, Neti said these kinds of systems will be implemented at the higher education level as well.

Indeed, many colleges and universities already utilize Big Data and learning analytics to predict student performance, place students in the right courses, and intervene when a student is struggling with a concept. Use of artificially intelligent course material will only increase over the next five years, the researchers predicted.

“This will follow students through entire career,” Netil said. It’s longitudinal data. It keeps track of all these things that a student has touched. It’s what they are beginning to call ‘career pathways.’ We’ll be able to detect  the aspirations of a particular student early and ensure the right learning pathways to help him get there. That’s a long-term process.”

Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake, and join the conversation with #eCNBigData.

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