How can Data Science transform education?
Even before COVID-19, the adoption of education technology has been exponentially rising, with global edtech investments reaching US$18.66 billion in 2019 and the overall market for online education projected to reach $350 Billion by 2025. Needless to say, the COVID-19 pandemic saw an explosion of edtech platforms and resources. Millions of children and teachers are using technology- be it language apps, virtual tutoring, video conferencing tools, or online learning software. What does this mean to edtech companies and data scientists?
Data scientists earlier relied on K-12 school and district records, digital archives of instructional materials and grade books, as well as student responses on course surveys. As video and voice recordings and online content consumption grow more prevalent, it may be a prime data source to analyze via novel computational means. The richness of educational data extends to the higher education realm where an increasing number of online courses are being employed. The increase in data generated also extends to stack exchange sites, forums, threads, and distributed forms of problem-solving that are used to educate employees and resolve task problems. All these data in the textual form, images, videos, etc. can be fruitfully utilized to solve persistent educational problems. An interesting direction is the personalization of education. What this means is that we can now deviate from the “one size fits all” approach to educational content and curricula.
Kids learn in different ways and at different paces. Personalized learning is a teaching model based on that premise. Each student gets a “learning plan” based on how he learns, what he knows, and what his skills and interests are. While personalized learning can apply to all students- across various age groups, demographics, and socioeconomic groups, it is particularly helpful to children with special needs. Accommodations, support, and accessible learning strategies are particularly essential parts of personalized learning and demonstrate great potential to help those requiring personalized attention and additional support. I have had the first-hand experience with understanding how customized education can impact such children. While being homeschooled due to chronic fibromyalgia, I often visited and interacted with children at a special needs home for orphans. The staff provided them all the basic necessities but did not focus on nurturing their social and cognitive development. Hoping to develop these abilities I put special efforts to teach the children a song. By the time I moved out of the city, most children could sing the song unassisted. When I visited them 3 years later, the fact that they sang the same song with the exact fervor left a profound effect on me. As my love for education met with my passion for technology, I began to see the possibilities of how these children’s lives could be improved by cheap affordable software and robots.
Here comes Data science. Firstly, what is Data Science? Data Science is a blend of various tools, algorithms, and machine learning principles with the goal to discover hidden patterns from the raw data. Now, what has Data Science to do with education? Data Science enables us to derive insights from the vast amount of data to customize education, aka employ adaptive learning techniques to discover the abilities of the students and use optimal teaching techniques according to them. Data Science can also be used by teachers to apply various analytic methods for evaluating the performance of students. This helps to inform their parents about the issues that might affect their child’s performance in different areas such as academics, sports, etc. This information can help the parents to keep an eye on their child’s activities.
More importantly, education is a very vast field and is only evolving with time. Further, education is meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp. Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2075. We may not see this future but they will, and our job is to prepare them for it. Data science can be used to constantly improve curriculum based on the changing education trends and updates to technology. Thus, we can all do away with that one-century old obsolete chapter which always made us wonder what we could ever do with the tons of details we memorized when all the content is available at the press of a button!
References:
- Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson Ted Talk: https://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-education-global-covid19-online-digital-learning/
- https://techvidvan.com/tutorials/data-science-in-education/#:~:text=Data%20Science%20in%20Education%20helps,ways%20to%20solve%20their%20problems.
