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.”