Data Analytics in education sector to see high growth

While specific numbers for analytics in education sector are not available, but with growing impetus on digitisation, skilling and adoption of ICT, there is definitely a large opportunity that lies ahead for data analytics in education sector in India

By Mohd Ujaley

There are no two opinions on the importance of the data. For a large corporation to a brick-and-motor store: data is an asset and opportunity for enabling innovation and creating new business models. Recently,  when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the facilities of German automotive major Bosch in Bangalore, one of the key presentation made by  member of the Bosch board of management, Peter Tyroller, was about using data analysis and data mining that helps in real-time prediction of accidents on roads. And, same is equally true for education sector. Schools, colleges, universities and educational bodies across the country holds humongous amount of data related to students and teachers which can effectively be analysed to uncover insights that can boost student achievement and improve operational effectiveness of the educational institutions.

The challenge and opportunities could be gauged from the recent Indian Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF) report which says that India’s education sector offers a great opportunity with approximately 29% of India’s population being between the age group of 0-14 years. The schooling segment in India is anticipated to be around $144 billion by 2020 from an estimated $95.8 billion in 2015. In 2014, with 29.63 million students and approximately 48,116 colleges and institutions, India’s higher education segment is the largest in the world. It is expected to increase to $37.8 billion by 2020.

Considering these findings, it is crucial for educational institutes to track and record demographics, educational performance, attendance, extra co-curricular and placement records data. They also need to closely monitor the financial planning and budgeting process, faculty data and other operational data. “On the operational front, analytics can provide interesting insights in several areas such as faculty attrition, popular courses and student preferences. Insights into educational performance can act as a strong guide for institutes to help their students opt for courses in higher studies, in turn, aiding them in their journey to choosing an ideal career path,” says Noshin Kagalwalla, managing director, SAS, India.

Adding to Kagalwalla views, Mitesh Agarwal, vice president and CTO, Oracle India, says “Education sector can leverage analytic solutions to increase student, faculty and staff productivity, better manage finances, streamline operations, and ensure student success. They can also track metrics around key segments such as student admissions, student records and financial management.”

Educational institutions are presently capturing only basic data
Typically educational institutions have been capturing data related to students and teacher’s age, qualifications, demography, attendance, test score, socio-economic status and placement. “Schools capture scores of students in various tests, attendance and in some cases performance of students in extra-curricular activities. The attendance data and test scores can be analysed to find out levels of interest in schooling for a specific student. If a student is losing interest, it will be first manifested in the attendance and then in grades,” says Sameer Dixit, head – big data and analytics, Persistent Systems.

Agreeing with Dixit views, Saugata Das, offering leader, cloud business solutions, personalized learning solutions, IBM, points out that “Analytics can help in correlate attendance with scores to identify the target scores and related minimum number of classes required.”

Some of the experts feel that presently educational bodies are only capturing basic data and they lack ability to discover meaningful pattern. According to Krishna Kant, who heads EMC’s academic alliance in South Asia & Russia, “Data generated by students, faculty and administration, can be analysed to discover meaningful patterns, and then it can be used to make important operational decisions but for that a good analytics tool is needed.”

Taking the Kant’s views, one step further, Sanjeev Kumar Gupta, managing director – health & public service, government relations and corporate affairs, Accenture explains that currently schools track data on the performance of students and teachers. However in the absence of dedicated and structured process, the data is not stored for a substantial duration to generate meaningful insights. He suggests that ideally, an education institute should store data for at least 5-6 years for high performance analytics.

Now more data can be captured and mined with the help of Data Analytics tools
Today, higher education institutions have data flowing-in from all directions such as online applications, software-based and online classroom exercises, and testing, social media, blogs, and student surveys. This augments the need for going beyond traditional use of technology.

“Today due to data analytics tools, it has become possible to track the entire student learning pathway based on learning style and capability. This gives rise to possibilities where tweaks can be made according to the pace and skill level of students. Tracking digital content also takes data tracking into a whole new space by providing student engagement metrics and identifying successful and unsuccessful learning content and initiatives,” says Das of IBM.

Kagalwalla of SAS India, also agrees that today’s cutting-edge analytics software allows capturing and deriving insights from a wide variety of data. “Institutes can now maintain not only academic data, but also capture and analyse data on extracurricular activities such as sports, music which may not be easily possible using traditional systems,” he adds.

“Given the technology advancement, almost every kind of data can be captured and stored. Further the cost of capturing, processing and analysis of data has come down significantly. For example, now there are schools that capture and store classes by experts, visiting faculty which can be used at a later stage,” informs Gupta of Accenture.

Social media analytics is another emerging area of application. Important aspects of students learning styles, behaviour and preferences can now be gauged from formal groups that the educational institutes may have on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs. “This helps the institutes learn a great deal about students’ preferences, concerns, reactions and perceptions,” reasons Kagalwalla.

Also, with the advent of video channels of education such as edX, coursera and even YouTube, a lot of analysis can be performed on the data that is captured. “When a student watches a video, the data such as which videos were watched, for how long, how many times the video was paused, after how much time did the student drop off (stopped watching the video and moved on to other video) can be easily captured. Even data about the order in which different videos are watched can be captured. To add to this comments and questions posted by students can also be captured and analysed. The e-learning tests can also be captured which can reveal several insights such as which questions did the student skip and on which questions did the student spend a lot of time,” explains Dixit of Persistent Systems.

What is driving the demand for data analytics in education?
Whether it is a businesses or an education institution, some of the business reasons for adopting analytics are: need for data-driven, informed decisions, increasing financial & operational efficiency, need to deliver quality services and responding to the demands for greater accountability. Other factors are digitisation, availability of data and increased competition due to active private sector role in education sector.

“Digitisation, internet and e-learning are the major factors that are driving demand for data analytics in education. Internet is making education more democratic. Today a student can access the best content from the best institutions across the globe. So nobody is as tightly bound to a specific institution and its teachers as one used to be 10 years back,” says Dixit.

According to Das, there is a proliferation of digital content pushing learning beyond class-rooms. This is giving rise to a large amount of structured and unstructured data which can be positively harnessed to improve learning. These can also lead to innovations which can help reduce cost.

Agarwal of Oracle asserts that there are three drivers for demand for analytics in the education sector. First, India is a knowledge based economy and technology is beginning to have a huge impact in the space. Second, there is competitiveness among educational institutions, especially top institutes like IIT’s, IIM’s and private players to attract the best talent and offer the best academic experience. Data analytics can play a critical role in creating the competitive differentiator like in any other industry. The third driver is India’s digitisation initiatives. Skill India is an important part of this drive to tackle the skill gap and we need to have the base data to do this.

How technologically Data Analytics is improving?
With the proliferation of technology, analytics has also improved over the years. The technological tools for e-learning, real time data capture, storage and analysis has been maturing. Also adoption of text analytics, sentiment analytics and statistical analysis for pattern mining are on the rise.

“Learning analytics is in many ways is applying Big Data to education. It is done by using in isolation or in combination any of the web analytics, artificial intelligence, data Mining, social network analysis or the traditional statistical techniques,” says Gupta of Accenture.

Organisations have also been using recommender systems, instant skill assessment tools, social network analysis, personalisation, adaptive content and data visualisation for advance data analytics. “Educational data mining combined with natural language processing (NLP), statistical analysis and modeling techniques such as predictive, prescriptive or text can help predict patterns. Machine learning and social network analysis is also an integral part of analytics” informs Das of IBM.

Major challenges to Data Analytics in education: Awareness, Privacy, Funding
The education sector is just warming up to the area of analytics. The major obstacles include – low awareness about opportunities that analytics has to offer, the absence of a culture of data-driven decisions and the need of a promoter or leader who can spearhead the analytics initiative in educational institutions. Other than these, experts are also of the view that no clarity on privacy law and limited funding also pose serious challenges to the proliferation of data analytics in education sector.

Accroding to Das, “There is lack of availability of quality institutional data. And, there is significant cost associated with collecting, storing and developing algorithms to mine data. Also, there are data integration challenges between structured and unstructured data.”

On challenge, Dixit, is of the view, “Even today majority of educational content is delivered through traditional means. This is a major hurdle while reluctance to share data is another hurdle.”

In spite of the enormous potential learning analytics also come with a bundle of concerns. Privacy for learners and teachers is a critical issue. Data access and ownership are equally important issues – who should be able to see the analysis that schools perform on learners? Acquiring data for analysis is also seen as a great challenge for the implementation of educational analytics

Privacy
“Privacy is a huge issue for any industry. So, organisations need to have the necessary measures in place to ensure that privacy is preserved,” says Deepak Ghodke, Country Manager, Tableau, India.

Agreeing with Ghodke, Raj Mruthyunjayappa, Managing Director, Campus Management, says “Privacy is an important concern. The onus is on campuses to inform students and other stakeholders on the nature of data being collected and where the data would be used and seek their consent before collecting data.”

Experts including Dixit of Persistent Systems belives that on an overall basis, data access rights have to be established across the institutions and each stakeholder of the institute can be provided with selective rights. Each school will have to come up with a data privacy policy which is best suited and preferred by all stakeholders of the school. “One of the possible solutions to address privacy issues is to anonymise the data and use a private cloud,” he suggests.

Awareness
Other key challenge is low awareness about data analytics use in education. And, experts say, one of the foremost ways to address this is to increase collaborative efforts between educational institutions and data analytics companies. Creating a curriculum through this methodology would be more effective. For example, IBM offers an education program called ‘Career Education for Business Transformation (CEBT)’. “CEBT is aimed at developing the right skilled professionals to enable impactful outcomes in respective industries so as to transform business for the modern era,” informs Das of IBM.

On the other hand, Persistent Systems has created a platform called ‘ShareInsights.org’ which is free for use for educational institutions subject to certain conditions. “Going beyond just creating awareness on data analytics, we have taken a step further to address this issue by setting up Persistent Computing Institute to provide new thinking in Computer Science education in India,” claims Dixit of Persistent Systems.

One of the premier business analytics firm, SAS India, also conducts regular monthly webinars for academic institutes. Partners, consultants are often invited to deliver guest lectures, host discussion sessions and meetings with schools at several levels ensuring the spread and reach of analytics across the nation. Company official informs that it offers joint programs on analytics with leading schools in India such as Indian School of Business (IBS), Hyderabad, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow and many others.

Other industry major, Accenture India, practitioners have been guest faculty for number of educational institutes. Recently, company did a short course in IIT Gandhinagar on analytics. While EMC has been running a successful initiative called EMC Academic Alliance to engage and educate the management of educational institutions, train the faculty and help them skill the students. The students are also given free assessment and credentials which they can use on their resume. Till date, Accenture claims to have educated over 4,000 students on Data Analytics.

Funding
On the challenge of availability of limited funding to educational institutes, Kagalwalla of SAS is of the that “Gone are the days when analytics was a tool in the hands of a select few. Innovations such as the cloud and affordable technologies such as Hadoop have helped in democratising analytics and making it available to more consumers at lower cost. So, educational institutions that may find the infrastructure for analytics expensive, can definitely explore these options.”

Dixit also agrees with Kagalwalla and he adds, “Lot of basic analytics software is available as open source. IBM Watson is free, so is R from revolution analytics and even Matlab.” He further says that most importantly – the most commonly used analytics tool is Microsoft excel so for students who want to learn analytics most of the basic things are available easily.

“Few practical measures can be taken to solve the funding issue. “Government funding can contribute vastly to the betterment of government schools at all levels – primary, secondary and high school. Alternatively, private schools can be funded through tie-ups with educational agencies,” says Das, adding that institutes need to look at ROI over the cost factor. Student pass percentage and employability are the key KPIs for any education institution. An educational institution ceases to exist if students do not pass or are not employable (for higher education).

Kant of EMC, believes that greater partnership between the industry and educational organisation is needed to create win-win situation, where Industry provides the funding and education institutes help the industry in providing students to work on innovation and industry solutions. “The other area to look at, is leveraging Digital Indian program, for ensuring there is proper infrastructure for institutes and their students, to learn the discipline and start driving the benefits, he adds.

He also informs that EMC federation has come out with community editions of some of its most popular offerings which can be used at zero cost by academia. The company also provides tools and lab environments on Data Analytics to educational institutes and students through EMC Academic Alliance with no cost.

For addressing the challenge of limited funding to educational institutes and their inability to adopt costly softwares, Viros Sharma, vice president & global business head – DWBI & analytics, ITC Infotech, advocates of forming a consortiums of educational institutes that can go for joint implementation of ‘Learning Analytics’ and that can reduce the per student cost. “Analytics as a service (AaaS) model could be another possibility from system integrators organisations or Independent software vendors in the interest of both educational institutes and companies,” he suggests.

Present status and the Road Ahead
There are tremendous growth opportunities for big data, analytic and especially analytics in education sector. According to research firm IDC, the big data and analytics market is expected to be $125 billion worldwide in 2015. And, it is growing at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.5%. Overall, the global smart education and learning market is set to grow from $105.23 billion in 2015 to $446.85 billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 24.4%.

In India, according to the industry body, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), analytics market is expected to be more than double to $2.3 billion by the end of 2017-18. Mohana Krishna, Director, Business Process Management (BPM), NASSCOM, says “India is still in early stage of adoption of analytics but the adoption is picking-up and the numbers are likely to go up in future.”

“Considering these findings of research firms and IBEF, we are very optimistic that analytics will see a high growth. While specific numbers for analytics in education sector are not available, there is definitely a large opportunity that lies ahead,” concludes Kagalwalla of SAS India.