The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education
Are schools ready for the power and problems of big data?
Imagine classrooms outfitted with cameras that run constantly, capturing each child's every facial expression, fidget, and social interaction, every day, all year long.
Then imagine on the ceilings of those rooms infrared cameras, documenting the objects that every student touches throughout the day, and microphones, recording every word that each person utters.
Picture now the children themselves wearing Fitbit-like devices that track everything from their heart rates to their time between meals. For about a quarter of the day, the students use Chromebooks and learning software that track their every click and keystroke.
What you're seeing is the future of K-12 education through the eyes of Max Ventilla, the CEO of AltSchool, a Bay Area startup that represents the most aggressive, far-reaching foray into the world of big data and analytics that the K-12 education sector has seen to date.
Eventually, Ventilla envisions AltSchool technology facilitating an exponential increase in the amount of information collected on students in school, all in service of expanding the hands-on, project-based model of learning in place at the six private school campuses the company currently operates in Silicon Valley and New York City.
He sees all those torrents of data flowing from the classroom into the cloud, where AltSchool engineers will have built systems for merging the disparate streams into a single river of information. AltSchool software and algorithms created by Silicon Valley's top developers and data scientists would then search the waters for patterns in each student's engagement level, moods, use of classroom resources, social habits, language and vocabulary use, attention span, academic performance, and more.
The resulting insights—say, that 6th graders perform better in math after exercising, or that the girls in a particular science class are bored because boys use the lab equipment more frequently, or that Johnny is using new vocabulary words in conversations with his friends—would be fed to teachers, parents, and students via AltSchool's digital learning platform and mobile app, which are currently being tested. The information would be accompanied by scheduling tips, recommendations for more gender-neutral science activities, and a playlist of assignments customized to each student.
How those suggestions are used, and whether they make a difference in how well each student learns, would also be tracked, creating a never-ending feedback loop of insights, experiments, recommendations, and product tweaks.
"We don't want to improve some aspects of what schools do. We want a different kind of universe in which schools can exist 30 years from now," said Ventilla, a 35-year-old Yale University graduate who previously worked as the head of personalization at online-services-giant Google.
For better or worse, it's not just pie in the sky talk.
Over the past decade, big data and analytics have slowly crept into the world of public education. Versions of the unobtrusive, real-time, embedded-in-everyday-activities collection of student-learning data now being pioneered by AltSchool and others are touted in the federal government's new National Education Technology Plan. Many observers hope the next step is the type of systemwide change that has already transformed the financial sector, health care, consumer technology, retail sales, and The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education - Education Week: