Big Data
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"Big data in the online learning space will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve learning outcomes for individual students."
This progression will require self-reflection and a ruthless commitment to elevate pedagogy over profits. But then only the naïve and uninformed considered teaching to be a simple and inexpensive proposition.
MOOCs have become the flavor of the moment in higher education reform circles because academia is desperately seeking solutions – and fast. In the United States, universities and colleges face tremendous pressures in terms of their business models, the mobility of students, the growing disillusionment with four-year degrees and the cost of higher education.
Academia is certainly in need of disruption, but it won't come from streaming a Stanford University lecture to 100,000 students around the globe. Scaling online courses for the masses creates a crowd; it does not constitute a classroom or an online learning environment.
Only by applying the data and customization tools that have made the online revolution possible in the last decade will academia be able to serve students without sacrificing what has always made higher education admirable and necessary, the remarkable act of individual learning.
Doug Guthrie
Doug Guthrie is dean, professor of international business and professor of management at the George Washington University School of Business, and is vice president for University China operation.
Big Data Factoids: According to Vishal Kumar's blog "Factoid to Give Big-Data a Perspective:"
Google’s Eric Schmidt claims that every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003
Bad data or poor data quality costs US businesses $600 billion annually.
According to Gartner Big data will drive $232 billion in spending through 2016.
48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content every day.
Data collection volume increased by 400% in 2012, from an average of 10 collection events per page to 50.
Sandy Pentland, MIT's "Big Data Guy" talks about reinventing society in the wake of Big Data: " I believe that the power of Big Data is that it is information about people's behavior instead of information about their beliefs. It's about the behavior of customers, employees, and prospects for your new business. It's not about the things you post on Facebook, and it's not about your searches on Google, which is what most people think about, and it's not data from internal company processes and RFIDs. This sort of Big Data comes from things like location data off of your cell phone or credit card, it's the little data breadcrumbs that you leave behind you as you move around in the world."