Big Data in Education
From Pg 201 to 203 of Big Data — A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
“All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall”
That one line from Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall sums up how modern education treats its children nowadays.
Mass production seems like a good analogy to explain the current education system — every year, tons of graduates walk out of colleges into the real world after undergoing more than ten years of standardized education together.
What do they stand to gain? Well, same sets of skills, same types of experiences, same growths of knowledge.
That’s how standardized education works.
Why ‘standardized’?
Realistically, providing the entire student population with a single curriculum makes it much easier for teachers and educators to manage their students.
Although such a system might be efficient, the irony here is that it leads to inefficient learning for students themselves and stifle their creativity.
Each student possesses distinct sets of strengths and weaknesses that set them apart from the rest of the students.
Under the current system, however, they’re missing out on the opportunity to make full use of their talents during the early years of learning.
But the approach, and the mindset behind it, is an artifact of the constraints in which the school system exists — and those constraints are a function of the state of technology.
Surprisingly, the underlying problem simply relates to the limitations of technology in the classroom.
And surely, big data can help with that.
Individualized Learning
How can big data step in to improve such a standardized system of education?
1Massive amounts of data can be collected to track students’ performances and come up with ways to help them reach their potential.
2 Lessons can be tailored to the specific needs of students to handle individual differences between them.
3 New information on the efficiency of an education system can be acquired through the use of students’ data in real life.
With the introduction of extensive data of each student into the system, education will surely be able to develop his/her uniqueness, or individuality, in a way that benefits both him/her and the society as a whole.
Advancements of the past methods of education will not only improve the learning of the student population, but also raise public awareness of the fact that no matter how old you are or what circumstances you’re in, an individual can never be interchangeable with another.
Unique skills and talents coming from various groups of people should not be disregarded, but rather, celebrated.
While this seems to be the best way of learning in theory, would it be able to produce the same kind of results on students in real life?
