Big Data

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What is “big data”? Who’s doing it? Why is the higher education community so interested in it?

According to Wikipedia, “‘Big data’ is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target, as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.”

Currently, big data is most commonly used by businesses and will become the “key basis for competition,” according to the McKinsey Global Institute’s May 2011 report “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity.” They point out five ways that big data can create value. And while this new abundance of data will help businesses make data-driven decisions and enhance target marketing of products to consumers by using data to identify pregnant women, for example (see “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” New York Times, February 16, 2012), we are still in the early stages of data collection. While many are excited by the challenge of exploring and analyzing the abundance of collected data and applying it to improve daily interactions, others are leery of where this data explosion could lead. In “The Future of Big Data,” a recently published report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, experts provide varying viewpoints on the use of big data and the future. Businesses are the most enthusiastic in their use of big data, but the federal government is also jumping on the data train. The Obama administration has issued plans to dive into the big data pool with a $200 million initiative spanning six federal departments in the hopes of “improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help solve some the Nation’s most pressing challenges.” If the federal government can manage such massive data collections and successfully promote this undertaking, this should motivate other areas of society to take up the challenge of using large data sets to improve various industries and the lives of their consumers.

Higher education is just beginning to explore how to leverage the massive amounts of data it collects to improve the student experience. In his article “The Rise of Big Data,” Louis Soares explains that giving students an opportunity to see their data “in useful ways…can allow students to become better managers of their own educational experiences and can also, perhaps, improve collective outcomes across all of higher education.” Students are starting to see that data and use it to their advantage to keep themselves on track academically, as discussed in an EDUCAUSE 2011 session, “Course Signals: A Student Success System/Stoplights for Student Success.” As we find ourselves in a vast wonderland of data gathering and analyzing in higher education in the next few years, it will be exciting to see how big data can meet the promise of reducing institutional costs, increasing college affordability, and improving student retention and completion.

EDUCAUSE Staff Picks

“The Rise of Big Data in Higher Education,” EDUCAUSE Live!, March 2012

Understanding and Managing the Risks of Analytics in Higher Education: A Guide, EDUCAUSE, June 2012

“Scientific Research: How Many Paradigms?” EDUCAUE Review, June 2012

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EDUCAUSE Library Items for Big Data

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Moving to "Here's What You Requested": May 6, 2013

Key Takeaways The transition from a homegrown, stand-alone legacy system to a commercial enterprise resource system revealed the inadequacy of the ERP's standard rep…
House Cmte. Passes Bill on Higher Ed. Data Transparency: May 16, 2013

On a bipartisan voice vote that took place in record time yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce approved sending the "Improving Postsecondar…
Data Analytics: March 19, 2013 | A session at the Midwest Regional Conference
March 19, 2013 MWRC13_281984 …
Building Organizational Capacity for Analytics: February 25, 2013

Optimizing student success is the “killer app” for analytics in higher education . Intelligent investments in optimizing student success garner wide support and have a strong, justifia…
Faculty Reporting Systems: Expectations vs. Realities: March 19, 2013 | A session at the Midwest Regional Conference
Faculty activity reporting systems are used to collect data regarding academic endeavors for promotion, merit, and reporting purposes. Recent attention on accountability, accreditation, and analyti…
Leadership and Learning Analytics: November 26, 2012

Learning analytics enables a new level of data-driven decision making for the purpose of supporting students . Learning analytics is a collective institutional effort in every way: ide…
IT Infrastructure to Support Analytics: Laying the Groundwork for Institutional Analytics: October 23, 2012

Analytics has become a hot topic in the educational community, and several key questions must be addressed concerning the infrastructure of an analytics program. These issues include the …
From Innovation Clusters to Datapalooza: Accelerating Innovation in Educational Technology: November 1, 2012

Richard Culatta is the Deputy Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. Education in the United States is entering a very exciting moment. For …
Big Data for Education: Data Mining, Data Analytics, and Web Dashboards: September 13, 2012

In this Brookings Institution report, author Darrell West, examines the potential for improved research, evaluation, and accountability through data mining, data analytics, and web dashboards. …
Austin Peay State University: Degree Compass: September 5, 2012

This case study from the EDUCAUSE book Game Changers describes the Degree Compass course recommendation system implemented at Austin Peay State University. The system adv…

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