Big Data – Innovating Education in a Big Way

Aug 16, 2022

The Covid-19 pandemic has replaced traditional school education with virtual learning. Education is currently being taught to students in traditional and non-traditional ways. This learning style teaches students to use high-end digital devices such as laptops, iPods, and mobile phones.

From tutoring programs to online colleges, online teaching tools are opening up educational niches and may continue for years to come.

While in an educational institution, professors, supervisors, and fellow learners typically leave a humongous amount of data and information behind. This information may be used to provide elevated learning (institutional-wide) and detailed understanding of key academic achievement (personal level growth). Tools like big data have shown to be quite successful in translating data in this situation.

Big data is a term used to describe a large, ever-growing dataset collected by organizations of all kinds.

 Various data sources related to education are online courses, educational and learning activities, academic data, and administrative data.

 The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) and other connected devices has significantly increased the number of information companies collect, manage, and analyze. The amount of data generated can reach approximately 3.5 trillion bytes per day.

 Big data analysis is highly sophisticated for very large and diverse data sets, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from different sources of various sizes, from terabytes to zettabytes. We have adopted a variety of analysis methods.

The characteristic functions of big data are:

• Volume: The size and amount of big data your organization manages and analyzes. It can also provide information about parameters such as overtime hours for individual learners.
• Velocity: Big data learning gives learners and institutions access to high-speed data in real-time. This allows students to change the wrong answer on the assessment test
• Variety: Big data refers to structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from new sources, the data can be heterogeneous in its diversity
• Value: The value is calculated based on the data collected. This is related to the value that big data can generate and is directly proportional to what your organization can do with the collected data
• Credibility: Checks the authenticity of incoming big data. Due to its versatility, big data has shown the potential to integrate learning data from thousands of educational institutions to provide a global perspective on education.

Benefits of big data in school education

• Improve student grades:

 The most common way to analyze student grades is the grades received on exams, projects, and assignments. However, you can accumulate all these grades and observe the unique data trails that students have left over their lifetime.

Analyzing these data traces helps educators understand student behavior and performance.

With big data, you can monitor actions such as:

• Exam question response time 
• The source of information they choose for further education
• Questions to skip
• Questions they successfully answered 

 Real-time analysis helps provide better performance feedback to students. Feedback can greatly improve your results. This is so that students can understand what they are good at and what they are behind.

• Better rating system:

 Big data helps educators track student performance. Analysis helps to understand performance at the individual and group level. Statistical analysis of each grade helps educators understand the areas of their students of interest. The scoring system can be extended to highlight important areas of excellence for students.

• Evaluation of Attention Engagement:

Regardless of how engaging the subject, there will always be some students checking their phones. Big data makes it possible to track the heartbeat, expressions, and things touched by students while they are listening to the teacher. The attentiveness of students may be examined using this data.

• Resource allocation:

 Appropriate resource allocation is important in higher education, and data is the key to efficiency.

 Big data provides insights into student occupancy in the classroom. If subject ENG102 has 5 sections and only 2 are full, you can merge the remaining 3 to save resources such as classroom space, teacher time, and energy consumption.

 From an infrastructure perspective, cloud-based systems have the potential to reduce data storage costs and free IT departments.

• Time efficiency:

 Saving school information in one central location can save you time. This is useful for simple tasks such as getting a single report or an automated annual registration report to measure and compare previous year’s registrations at the same time.

 Real-time decisions enable today’s decisions to improve or continue registration consistency.

Conclusion:

Big Data is the most in-demand currently. Various educational institutions are looking for ways to utilize Big Data to enhance their operations and attract more students. Big Data can help you keep up with those changes by providing you with actionable insights to better understand your audience.