Turning the Tide

Prithvijit Roy CEO, BRIDGEi2i

The presence of Big Data in education is helping the sector in finding out the bottlenecks and working upon to improve the dropout rates and other challenges. In an exclusive chat with Elets News Network (ENN), Prithvijit Roy, CEO, BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions tells about the positive role of Big Data in education.

What is the role of Big Data in changing the education system?

State’s structural changes in the economy and society have a direct influence on the education system. Even the numbers suggest that the quality of education and across institutions has become a point of major concern. The capacity of the state to finance education, possibilities of driving inclusivity and multidisciplinary approach to education and alternate modes of financing have become an important issues. Nowadays, inmost countries, the share of education in the state’s budget has reached an alltime low resulting in limited resources to drive change. Now, this calls for a judicious usage of resources.

Analytic has addressed this problem for businesses over the years. Now, the dynamic scenario in education sector and the overload of data has made the whole industry to look up to big data in conjunction with analytics. I strongly believe that this problem of scare resource in the field of education can be tackled with the help of Big Data. In a word, it can be the potential savior. It is the right data which needs to be used to draw the insights and deliver impact for education.

We know that big data is a tool to drive innovation in education and that teacher quality impacts student achievement. How can we use big data to improve teacher quality with the ultimate goal of increasing student achievement?

Improving teacher quality can be a great way improving the achievement. There are two aspects to improving quality of teachers, one would be to hire the right type of teachers and the other would be to equip them with right type of tools and help them with right intervention points to create the difference that we are looking at. For a global education company, we analyzed the reasons behind teacher attrition using key driver analysis and identified trigger points to improve the same.

As far as hiring is considered, Big Data is being extensively used today. Gone are the days when hiring was based on grade-point averages, work history and degrees.Now the world as such is moving towards innovative methods including evaluating a candidate based on happiness level and how well a person interacts with others.On the other hand, if a teacher is provided with information on who has potential of dropping out or identify the groups that have a potential of scoring low than an intervention could potentially eliminate the shortcoming thereby resulting in increased student achievement levels.

What are the benefits of adopting big data at University level? Will changes related to Big Data come fast to institutions?

Big data can play a huge role in education industry but the top three would be predicting and preventing dropouts in university, scoring and grading, personalized and adaptive learning.

We saw this for a Global University where using the student demographics and past performance data, we could analyse and predict dropout percentages and help teachers develop better understanding of student success metrics.

Prithvijit Roy CEO, BRIDGEi2i
Prithvijit Roy
CEO, BRIDGEi2i

What is the rate of adoption of big data in education? What are there medial measures to be taken?

Recent studies say that 70 per cent of enterprise organization have either deployed or are planning to deploy big-data related projects and programme. As far as education sector is concerned,there seems to be an increased adoption of data to provide more personalized education and measure the impact of education provided. For example, the recent advent of MOOC’s (define) has resulted in the increase usage of big data technologies.And you can also evidently see that in the increasing trend towards the usage of online education portals.

What is the special nature of Big Data in Higher education context?

The question is not about Big Data alone.Adoption of relevant and right data is the main question facing the education sector. Such data could include enrollment patterns, student demographics,student performance and dropout rates.

 

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