Big Data has changed education forever. Learning with Big Data reveals If your school has not fully embraced big data you should consider moving your child’s education elsewhere. In higher education its fully integrated across the institution from the admissions office all the way through the office of alumni relations.
This short e-read builds upon the success of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think released in 2013. This book is not about MOOCs, but does dedicate pages to the background and success of Khan Academy.
Authors Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation from Oxford and Kenneth Cukier from The Economist introduce Learning with Big Data by way of the role of machine learning at Stanford. The course is taught by Andrew Ng, cofounder of Coursera.
Ng has brought to the globe the ability to teach a world class curriculum in machine learning from California to students in Tibet. In many ways this very idea is threatening to close minded administrators sitting in their siloed office.
The focus in this special book is how big data, which reveals to educators what works and what does not is reforming education. The ability today to interactively track the performance of each individual student in real time throughout the semester can make a big difference because the data drives how focused, dedicated administrators can more effectively budget extremely tight dollars in guiding a campus forward.
Surprisingly one area of interest is the role of e-textbooks. I cannot say how truly disruptive this is today on a college campus. Within the last 30 days the University of Wisconsin’s second largest campus, located in Milwaukee announced the closure of the University Bookstore. This also impact the pending layoff of the staff too. The campus explored over time a number of cost saving measures in light of a proposed $40 million dollar budget cut from the State of Wisconsin legislature. To cut costs and not necessarily better serve students, the focus in Milwaukee will be to contract an online commercial service, think Amazon.com’s textbook store or Barnes&Noble.com’s college textbook store. The impact of a $40 million dollar budget cut stops all campus strategic planning for the coming decade. In a growing environment of conservative legislatures around the country implementing massive cuts to higher education the role of Big Data is even more important today than ever. And for those institutions that have embraced Big Data, an Admissions crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
But please do not confuse the idea that the bookstore jacks up the price of college textbooks. The complicated, long standing business relationships established decades ago by college textbook resellers have created the well documented explosion in college textbooks. Today most students simply rent a ebook that simply is triggered to expire at the end of the semester. That is not to say that students have flocked to the internet to locate torrents of their textbooks.
Yet Learning with Big Data also touches on the startup community’s drive to refining higher education and how long time vendors are not standing still in this new marketplace. Just the number of LMS startups is flourishing in the startup market.
Interestingly is the missing chapters of Admissions and Alumni. The role of big data in the age of Facebook and social media is surprisingly missing. A very strong solution to tap into will focus on how smart the institution’s PR office will leverage big data analytics to identify top tier students in order to help enhance their institutional profile. There is strong opportunities still untapped.
Ultimately the scenario many colleges run into is swimming upstream with a legacy vendor only playing in the higher education marketplace. The world is increasingly driven by Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Azure. Legacy companies that have wedged a living by focusing only on higher education cannot truly maximize their corporate investments against the above three vendors. Ultimately those colleges will continue to slowly move forward with hesitation due to their umbilical cords forever linked to the higher ed only market providers.