Digital Transformations

Big Data Case Studies with Proven Results

Big Data Case Studies: Coursera

Coursera provides education from leading universities around the world delivered over the internet. The instruction is handled through data streaming videos. Coursera tracks how its students watch those courses. Students might “rewind” to watch a section a second time. Or they might fast forward – skipping stuff they think they already know. Or they might go over the same course several times. Or they might just quit and walk away. Whatever they do, Coursera tracks it on a student-by-student basis. The company learns from this experience. It learns what works and what doesn’t. Occasionally it throws in a pop-quiz to see how well the students are learning. But there’s another reason, too. The company wants to see how well it’s doing. It’s a kind of self-evaluation. When the course designers realize that the learning process is not going as they had expected, they can go back and rework their material based on real-world feedback.

Big Data Case Studies: Arizona State University

Arizona State University, like many universities across the country, has its fair share of freshman students who are genuinely challenged in mathematics. One third of their freshman classes earned less than a C in math. Interestingly, this one score has been a reliable indicator of whether students would eventually graduate and collect their degrees – or drop out. To deal with this, ASU worked with Knewton apply its adaptive learning techniques. In just two years – from 2009 to 2011 — the pass rate in this course jumped from 64% to 75% at the same time the dropout rates fell by 50%.

Big Data Case Studies: West Virginia University

Simon Diaz, a professor at West Virginia University, was very curious why so many students who enrolled in online classes dropped out. One of the key rationales for providing online classes with streaming video at times convenient for the students was that the students wouldn’t feel shackled to a schedule that was incompatible with the daily realities of their lives. Using Big Data analytics, he looked at 33 variables for more than one million students. These variables included everything you would expect like age and gender to things you wouldn’t expect like military service and class size. What he discovered had never been obvious to anyone else before. The more classes students took at any one time, the more likely they were to drop out. Simply by reducing the number of courses students enrolled in at any one time would increase retention rates. But financial grants to students require those students to take a minimum number of courses. In other words, public policy was at odds with good educational practice – a conundrum that no one had discovered before based on a policy that had probably never been thought through with any empirical evidence. Another win for Big Data in Education.

Big Data Case Studies: Kent State

Kent State uses analytics to track student activity and project the likelihood of success. It tracks students over a ten-year time period collecting data about their majors, classes, demographics and other factors. Their system highlights the students at risk with red, yellow, green indicators. The reports help advisors focus their efforts on problem areas. Steven Antalvari, Kent State’s director of academic engagement and degree completion, said, “This data has helped us peel away certain layers faster, allowing us to spend the bulk of our time together working on the student’s purpose, goals, and career development.”

Here are some of the well-recognized in the Education Technology (EdTech) sector – in no particular order. These are the companies that are developing the paradigms that will shape Big Data in Education. They are also the companies that are developing the technologies to implement those paradigms and offer them to educational institutions.

This is important because, until recently, schools have not needed to look outside their own walls for the tools they needed to do their work. The obvious exceptions are textbooks and, starting some 60 years ago, general purpose computers.

Educase Conference – This company is growing fast. It offers systems to store Big Data in a cloud and perform analytics on that data to make sense of it for administrators.

SAS – is a well-established company that dominates the advanced analytics industry with almost 32% of the market.

Renaissance Learning – A few years ago this company was sold for $1.1 billion. Renaissance is a testing and student data company. At the time of its sale, it had data on the test results for 10.1 million school age children.

InBloom – This company is a middleman between school districts and education technology companies. It handles the data storage and distribution of student data to authorized users. The Bill and Melinda gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York had so much confidence in this venture that they kicked in $100 million. However, social concerns about data security grew to a fever pitch and the company withdrew its offerings.

Coursera – Coursera is a start-up company that offers courses over the Internet. It offers accredited courses from Illinois, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, UC San Diego, Duke University and 150 other universities around the globe. Students can even earn a master’s degree in business, accounting, data science, and entrepreneurship through Coursera.

Noodle – Noodle is based in New York. The company offers fact-based information to help prospective students choose an elementary school, a graduate school, a summer camp, or even a tutor.

Knewton – According to its website, Knewton recognizes the value of adaptive instruction and education technology: “Individual students bring different skills and different challenges into the same classroom. Knewton’s pioneering approach to adaptive learning draws on each student’s own history, how other students like them learn, and decades of research into how people learn to improve future learning experiences.”

This is What Big Data in Education Looks Like

One educational practitioner used Big Data to catch an anomaly in a course that was designed to progress smoothly from one module to the next. He found that the students in the class progressed from module 1 to module 7 as expected. At that point, however, most of them went back and replayed module 3 again. It became very clear that the material in module 3 hadn’t “stuck.” This led the course developers to revisit that module and upgrade it. They did this even though none of the students complained about that module. By monitoring what students actually did on a massive scale, the company saw an opportunity to upgrade its course and did it. In this blog, we will discuss the importance of big data in education.

In another instance, students were stumbling on a particular question and were notified immediately that they missed it. Many of those students read the related forum material, reworked the quiz, and got the answer right. When the course instructor discovered this through Big Data analysis, he inserted a recommendation in the course for students who got the answer to that question wrong: He referred them to the forum post that had proven useful for everyone else.

Spanish speaking students studying English via Duolingo would stumble and fall when learning the English pronouns he, she, and it. This led to high dropout rates. Why? Well, Spanish doesn’t have an equivalent to it. This was a new concept – and new way of thinking – for Spanish speaking students. The solution was simple. The course postponed the introduction of the word it for a few weeks and student retention soared.

New York City has a program School of One. In this school, each student gets his own playlist of modules to study. The students need to learn math. They go at their own speed. If one module doesn’t do the trick for them, they try another. Now, the real question is, “Does it work?” Well, independent studies by a private educational service reported that students who went through this program did substantially better than those who did not. Yes, it works.

What is Big Data in Education?

There are two major areas of interest in the field of Big Data in Education: institutional and educational.

Institutions collect masses of data from traditional sources as well as new sources to develop their policies and plans. The new sources include Facebook posts and Twitter tweets to get a sense of the sentiments among current students, prospective students, and the community at large. The institution can also pick up macroeconomic and microeconomic data that are useful but were prohibitively expensive to include before.

Educational or instructive purposes are intended to personalize the learning process for each individual student. Here, schools at all levels can collect detailed data about students’ progress through their learning journey on a moment by moment basis. The idea is that the system can identify when a student is caught in a vortex that prevents her from making progress. At that point, the system could notify the teacher about the problem a student is having at the moment it occurs. On the other hand, the system could be designed to introduce a tutorial that deals with the problem area as it occurs, not weeks later when a failing score highlights the students’ learning problems.

This student oriented real-time instructional intervention has several benefits. First, it helps the students well before frustration, disillusionment, and failure set in. This helps the students to become proficient in the subject material – even master it. It also has the benefit of assisting the teacher to focus her attention on just the sort of help that is needed. This is particularly beneficial in large classrooms. Students’ success in the classroom will lead to them staying in school and gravitate toward matriculation. Success in school is correlated with success in the work place.

In addition, as students stay in school and graduate, the school builds its reputation as a place where students can come to succeed. This attracts new students. Further, by keeping students in school until graduation, the school improves its revenues as well as its reputation. These retention and graduation rates loom large in school evaluations.

The US is Not a Leader

Ironically, the US is not a leader in education when compared with other developed countries in the world. We have seen class sizes in the public schools grow to the point that teachers can no longer provide individual attention. Funding to schools at all levels is constantly being cut back. There is no question that America is home to some of the leading universities in the world, but those universities are not characteristic of the country as a whole.

One way of dealing with this growing gap between the quality of education and access to education in the US compared to other countries is to adopt distant education and Big Data technologies. These technologies promise to offer education aligned with the students’ schedules, not the class room schedules. Further, it promises to offer meaningful tutorials on problem areas tailored to each student as and where they are needed. These benefits are likely to be compelling in informing educational policy.

AltSchool May Be the Extreme

If you want to know what Big Data in Education on steroids looks like, look at AltSchool. This San Francisco Bay Area company will record everything about their students while they are in school. That means EVERYTHING. It will track how they go through their learning experiences – heart rate, eye movement, facial expressions, movement from one part of a computer screen another, how long their mouses hover over items on their screens. They will record every word. Almost every thought. Everything. All of this data is then fed into a Big Data database. Top notch data scientists will comb through this data to learn in detail how to personalize the learning experience for each child.

AltSchool might find that some students improve their mathematics studies after exercising in the schoolyard. Or a student starts incorporating new words in her vocabulary after watching a particular video. Then the school will incorporate those insights into the student’s daily routine and see whether the benefits persist over time. In fact, the school planners would use Big Data to look for an ongoing series of tweaks they could make. That will provide a stream of changes that may (or may not) provide enduring value. This is personalization at the extreme.

Some argue that this sort of super tight oversight smacks of Big Brother — and maybe it does. But if it pays off in terms of enhanced results for the students, then it may be worthwhile. There are probably hundreds of practices we respect in everyday life today that may have seemed strange – even objectionable – our forefathers a few generations ago. For example, it was less than three generations ago that it was common practice to whip children who performed poorly in school; today that practice would be unheard of.

Huge Investments

GSV Advisors estimated that the e-learning market in the US is over $100 billion. Further, it’s growing at 25% a year. Well-established companies like McGraw-Hill, News Corp., Pearson, and Kaplan have spent billions to get into this market. Further, there are a lot of start-up companies mushrooming in this space as well. We’ve listed just a handful of some of the notables below, but there are many other worthy companies that didn’t make this list