Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-17-2017

Department

Library and Information Services

Language

English

Publication Title

Educause Review

Abstract

Key Takeaways

  • Trends in education promise to improve how institutions support students by providing the student, instructor, or institution the ability to make more informed decisions using student-created data.

  • Unfortunately, as our reliance on data increases, our ability — especially students' ability — to access the data seems to diminish.

  • Whereas learning analytics gives a small number of users access to a single large data set, personalized learning requires that a large number of users — students — have access to their own relatively small portion of data within various systems.

  • While no solutions come without a cost, enormous potential benefits to institutions, educators, and students arise if we adopt systems that provide access to data produced by students.

    The rise of big data accompanies a diverse number of trends in education that promise to improve how our institutions support students. While these trends may vary in scope, they all provide the student, instructor, or institution the ability to make more informed decisions. To do so, they rely on our ability to access and synthesize student-created data. This includes structured data such as attendance, completion rates, and grades, along with the unstructured data of student assignments, discussion posts, and any content created by students. I therefore find it concerning that as our reliance on data increases, our ability to access the data seems to be diminishing.

Comments

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit Educause's Website.

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