Today's children have tablets or laptops as soon as they start school, and many of them can't even read or write when they get their computers. Some countries require second-graders to have the ability to type 60 words per minute in order to adapt their students to computer-based standardized tests. Today's children have digital records of their names, addresses, birth dates, medical and behavioral records before they go to school.
The vision of applying technology and big data in the classroom is already a reality and is evolving at a very fast pace, so fast that we can't predict what will become of the standardized education that children receive in the next few years. This is yet another piece of evidence that our lives have become inseparable from big data. But when this happens to our children's education, is it a good thing or a bad thing?
Forming a feedback closure and the benefits of big data in education
As far as education is concerned, the most important aspect has always been forming a feedback closure. The teacher poses a problem and then the student tries to solve it. From the student's attempts to solve the problem, the teacher can find out what the student understands and what he or she does not understand, and then make adjustments to the teaching behavior based on that. Similarly, students can deepen their understanding as they try to solve problems.
This closure is very effective in one-on-one or low-student/teacher ratios, but it is very difficult to create when the number of students is too large and there are differences in levels between students. That's where big data and technology come into play.
Any teacher can take a course with students, but it's not as easy to pinpoint the specific problems of each student, especially if the class is large. A big data company called Knewton has developed a digital platform that analyzes the learning process of millions of students (from kindergarten through college) and uses that analysis to design more sensible test questions and more personalized course objectives. Most recently, the company formed a partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to develop a personalized math curriculum for K-12, as well as with French startup Gutenberg Technology to develop smart digital textbooks.
Simply put, these programs and textbooks can adapt to each student's differences. The program can determine, based on a student's performance, whether the current topic is too difficult, too easy, or just right? Then, based on the judgment, the difficulty of the topic is changed in real time. Students can control their learning progress at their own pace without being influenced by the behavior of other students around them. The system then gives the teacher a feedback on which student is struggling in which area, as well as overall analytical data on the performance of the whole class.
So, are there any drawbacks to this method of teaching?
Holdbacks to Big Data in Education
As with all other applications that use big data, there have been some expressions of incomprehension and concern about using big data in education. The most common concern is a data breach, and it's happened before - in 2009, a school district in Tennessee in the U.S. inadvertently exposed the names, addresses, birthdates, and complete social security numbers of 18,000 K-12 students to an unsecured server, and the process went on for months.
Another concern is that this data will remain with students throughout their educational careers, like the mysterious "permanent files" that schools used to use. After all, just because a student was labeled a "troublemaker" in elementary school doesn't mean he'll still be a "troublemaker" in middle school, but may turn out to be a completely different person. But because he is still labeled as a "troublemaker" in his digital file, school authorities and teachers may treat a changed student based on this past evaluation, which is clearly inappropriate.
Other groups are concerned that these students' data will be used for commercial marketing. In theory, schools and big data software developers could indeed target students with precise, personalized ads in specific areas. Perhaps a student writes a paper about baseball and then receives ads for tickets to a local baseball game.
The Shifting Role of the Teacher
All areas involving data, from finance to retail, run into these concerns and obstacles, but there's another issue with using big data in education -- the shifting role of the teacher. As more and more technology and data applications are put to use in teaching and learning, the role of the teacher should shift with it - from a teaching role to a data-driven management role. However, this is a very difficult process.
Great teachers choose to become teachers primarily because they are passionate about educating students. They love to see their students' eyes light up when they understand a problem. They also love the enthusiasm that is unleashed when a student is immersed in a point of knowledge. Unfortunately, these great teachers are reluctant to let algorithms take over all of this, and they're reluctant to do some of the data entry and management work, even though all of this may ultimately help students move toward excellence.
So big data and technology may not be the panacea for education's problems. I believe that we should develop applications to assist good teachers in teaching, not replace them with big data and data analytics. Ultimately, understanding and applying data and its analytic processes will benefit both students and teachers, just as it does in other professions.
I don't know how you all feel about this, should we use data to record and analyze everything our students do in the classroom? Or should we keep teaching the traditional way and let big data stand aside?