By Sandeep Kavety, Head, Product, ConveGenius Insights
Big data technology incorporates a lot of detail and can be applied to any real-world problem. The cloud-based infrastructure used to implement big data technology makes it cost-effective and efficient. Education is another industry where this technology can have a considerable impact on the rest of the sectors. There’s an even more colloquial word for the implementation and adoption of big data technology for education known as Educational Intelligence. It refers to the practical use of multiple data points within a student’s life cycle to improve the overall education system.
In the past two years, due to the onset of the pandemic, education has become completely dependent on technology. The development and usage of technology have created more opportunities for interaction, collaboration, and sharing of learning, which in turn has generated a tremendous amount of learning data. It has yielded an opportunity to collect, interpret and analyze the learning evidence in the education system. The corresponding education data mining technology arises at a historic moment. With the aid of this big data of education, transforming data to information, knowledge, and wisdom is the objective educators are determined to pursue.
Using education data
Education is an ultra-complex system involving multiple stakeholders. Various educational practices, such as learning, teaching, management, and research, directly lead to more diverse types of academic data and more complicated data collection and analysis. There are multiple classification perspectives for educational data.
From the perspective of data sources, data can be divided into assessment data, classroom observation data, survey data, human-computer interaction data, physiological data, and learning environment data.
Assessment data itself has subcategories, which — more than test scores — educators, learners, administrators, and parents can use to achieve different goals. Formative assessment provides ongoing data (such as a concept map for problem-solving and processing data) to ensure that educators and learners know where learners are struggling and what adjustments need to be made to move forward.
Summative assessment data reports how successful the teaching and learning have been, and whether a learner has reached some standard or benchmark, including a midterm exam and a final project.
Potential in data analysis to change the education system in India
Data is an increasingly important resource, especially for a developing country like India, which will have the most significant number of young people on the globe. Population size like this can be a boon if these young people are skilled enough to join the workforce. However, it can only happen if there is enough focus on the education sector. Across the world, sectors such as corporate services, businesses, the education sector, the public sector, government agencies, etc., have been reaping the benefits of data analytics.
In India, with education moved to online, there is a need to train the teachers under emerging technologies. If educators can learn analytics, they will be able to use data to understand the students’ performance and use them for lesson outcomes. It will help in setting test and exam benchmarks. Tools like multi-source knowledge mapping and predictive analysis, educators can design a system that caters to individual learning needs and a more comprehensive evaluation. The data for students can be gathered through their overall participation in class, interaction with classmates or teachers, levels of zeal or sobriety, etc. Monitoring these activities daily will help understand the students’ performance better. The same will be used to strategize measures to improve students’ growth.
Data analysis can help determine everything about a student – from academic performance to participation in cultural or sports-related activities, attendance patterns, etc. Schools will be able to push the best in students as per their capabilities based on the data instead of pushing them towards the same goals. It will create a favorable learning environment for every student. Additionally, teachers will be able to use data analytics for customizing courses as per their skills and aptitude. Based on students’ performance data throughout the school, it will help them get into colleges and then further land jobs.
