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Can Success Be Measured?

The idea of analyzing real-time data in appealing reports and dashboards is becoming more realistic as big data and data analytics come into play. As companies obtain more and more data, the demand to store, process, and analyze large datasets at low costs is increasing exponentially. The time now is ripe as data storage has gotten extremely cheap making it more efficient and cost effective to store massive quantities of data. I remember just 10 years ago I bought my first laptop for college with an external wireless card, a 3.5 floppy disc drive, and only a 30GB hard drive. A few weeks ago I went out and bought a new laptop with a 1TB hard drive. It is amazing how much data we can store just on our hard drives now.

It is no secret; education in the United States has been on the decline for the past 30 years. There are many theories as to why this is happening but I believe it is because the education industry as a whole is slow to react and adopt new technologies. Now with education institutions offering online classes there is the opportunity to increase data collection and analytic efforts. This data could be: website data, application data, admissions data, student records, course evaluations, student performance records, learning management system data, social media data, alumni surveys, etc. Of course there are many challenges in an education institution and the one that is of most concern is cost. Aggregating data, structuring database systems, and creating an analytics platform is very expensive and time consuming. However, then there is the barrier of understanding what data analytics is. How can data analytics help the institution? What problems does it help solve? Does the institution need something like this to remain competitive?

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There are many education institutions that have implemented innovative solutions that use data to help solve issues and make decisions. Arizona State University created a system called “eAdvising” that helps students follow a plan by informing them when to take key courses. The system even alerts students if they get off track or begin to perform poorly. The Austin Peay State University in Tennessee created a similar analytics program called “Degree Compass” which provides students a customized list of course recommendations based on degree requirements as well as predicted grades. There are several more efforts going on and you can read more about them here.

Many online schools are using data analytics for many operational tasks from tracking student activity online to analyzing how their students interact with the online course material. Similar to Google Analytics, these institutions are creating dashboards and reports that show student activity, logins, interactions, participation, time spent on content, number of assignments, grades, submissions, and more. These reports are created for students, professors, and course designers to ultimately analyze the activity and feedback to help make improvements.

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All of this data seems very interesting to me, but can it be useful? The trend I see is a lot of institutions are analyzing some of the quantitative data available, but why not all and what about the qualitative data? What about the college experience? Does it really matter how well a student did in a course if the student thought it was a waste of time or too easy? I think data can be useful when making decisions, improving course content, and improving learning outcomes, but can success of the student be measured or predicted? Since every student comes from a unique background with different experiences why only concentrate on quantifying and assigning data values to a student’s behaviors? I believe data analytics will be very useful for institutions in the near future, but the true innovators will find a way to correlate students’ performance in school with post-graduate performance and career success. Analyzing the outcomes of the student and correlating their satisfaction could really help the institution understand what will work for future students with similar backgrounds. I believe this is the answer to our declining education system and our team at College Miner has stepped up to the plate ready to take a swing at it. We just need more people to pitch us the ball.



from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/can-success-be-measured/