Machine Learning and Africa’s Higher Education

Today, Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and their ilks have become very intelligent and powerful co-operations and the question should be how?
Wait, before we jump at the answer let’s go to the reason I asked the question, higher education.
Okay, back to the question, at the core of these companies innovative products are users data. At the back-end, these companies collect intelligent information about their users in other to observe them all the time(to these companies, studying you every day is their classified mission; well, that’s on a lighter note, but seriously it is). The information they get is analyzed to the most granular data, to tell for example, if a teenager whom they’ve never seen is pregnant even before she knows with the purpose of targeting her with the right ads (Target Company, find the story here https://tinyurl.com/y8fojr4e).

So many institutions of higher learning are asking a simple question, how can we be good at what we do, how can we help learners perform better, whereas the question has already been answered; study your learner, get intelligent feedback from their learning path, know what works in the process and what doesn’t work, then adjust what you have to suit the learner’s need.
Now, this sounds a bit complex, especially when you are working with hundreds or thousands of students because after you’ve gotten intelligence from your data you would need to adjust your course content, personalize examples or exercises, and so on . So we just ignore the right thing to do and seriously I don’t blame anyone in this kind of situation.
You see, the only way a university, for example, can use this approach is when they focus also on learning from their users(students) and not just on developing products based on intuition.
This kind of flexibility can only be achieved by the use of technology and not just technology, I mean a very intelligent technology that learns from students.
As I write this I am thinking of Africa’s higher education, so when this technology is ready for use, I would be the first to announce it.