How Big Data is Empowering Education
This essay will explore some most prominent ways in which Big Data analytics is being utilised by educational institutions to foster the learning outcome of students, making decisions and to make learning more objective.
In the education sector, there is a lot of data generated in the form of lecture notes, other teaching materials, assignments, quizzes, exam and so on. Through the use of Big Data, the individual performance of a student can be measured based on past trends. If Big Data system flags a controversial phenomenon, for example, a student who always gets A or A+ starts getting fail grades, can be easily observed by a teacher or concerned authorities and investigation can be initiated for the possible reasons with a consultation with the concerned student (Huang et al., 2019).
Big data helps tutors in the evaluation of education system state, through gaining a deeper understanding of the educational experience of learners. Big data describes extensive collections of information, and which is exponentially growing with time. Data mined is used by various institutions for predictive modelling and analysis. Big data function on the rule to achieve more of new understanding and create a forecast that will predict the future; one has to know more about anything (Rouse, 2018).
Customised programs and digital learning in education are highly supported through big data technology (Wilkinson & Gagliardi 2017). Most students rely on technology immensely. While some devices entertain, others provide improved education quality through innovation. Using big data, every individual student can have customised programs. Through merged learning, which is a combination of virtual and offline learning, it is possible to customise programs for students (Daniel 2015).
With the use of big data systems, learning institutions have managed to come up with a merged program of the online and physical class learning (Ayers, 2018). This will result in allowing students to achieve learning at an optimum pace and achieve targeted results in education. Another way Big data technology is helping students through interactive learning and real-time reporting of the learning process of the student. This relaxes teachers, to some extent, and it helps introvert nature of students in learning in a more effective environment.
Missouri’s St. Louis University has successfully harvested the power of Big Data analytics for campus placement purpose by inviting the screened candidates who were found to be most suited and who were most satisfied with the quality of education they had received (Big Data Analytics News, 2019). Hence, this is another area of education where Big Data analytics improves the experience of concerned learners and educators (Wilkinson & Gagliardi 2017)
Big Data has proved to help with the problem of student dropout in higher education through predictive analysis technique and helping students choosing the right course and subject which actually are of interest for the students (Castillo, 2019). Through the use of algorithms, student's behaviour in how they read texts, challenging, and easy part to understand by the learners is observed. With real-time data provision, reading materials can be changed by writers often to address learners concerns while improving the overall result.
Student advancement has been solely dictated by the student age in the traditional learning path. An occasional collection of results may cause students who are exceptionally talented remain in the same class as their gifted peers (Ayers, 2018). Through the use of big data technology, instructors can continuously gauge learner’s performance and improve learners consequently. Lastly, Big Data learning analytics is useful for decision-makers of the institute. For example, based on reports generated from data, decision-makers can decide to launch new courses or stop courses with lower interest from students (Wong 2017).
It can be concluded that Big Data has been implemented in the education and learning sector in many ways. From learning analytics to providing real-time results are some of most common benefits to education sector from Big Data. Big Data has been useful in increasing students' and learners interest and helpful in prevention of course dropout rate. Thus, it is working in the favour of learning and education field.