All my previous posts
during this term were about the new technologies applied in the education. The
new technology that I am going to introduce can neither be seen nor touched (Long&Siemens,2011),
It is the Big data and the analytics.
According to the McKinsey Global Institute big data is a
“dataset whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to
capture, store, manage and analyze.” The data collected is huge and is indeed “Big”.
Big data is valuable for governments, corporations and higher educational
institutions.
The analytics, on the
other hand, can be divided into two subcategories: learning analytics and
academic analytics. The 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics and
Knowledge identified learning analytics as a “measurement, collection, analysis
and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of
understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.”
Academic analytics refers more to business intelligence in education and
emphasizes analytics at institutional, regional, and international levels.
That is to say, the learning analytics reflects the data of
a specific learning, whereas the academic analytics presents data analysis at
an institutional level.
Although the articles that I read were very clear in
explanations of these tools, however it wasn’t enough for me realize its
importance both for a learner and the institutional organization. The class
discussion spread light on this topic for me. We did an in hand review of the
analytics and played with the possibilities that the learner and the
organization may have by accessing its analytics. It turns out that once you
have access it is very easy to see everything which is done in the web page. For
example, in our blogs, we can easily see how many viewers we have from each
country. If you have the access to a certain webpage you can see where the
visitors click first, where they click next, how long they stay in that specific
web page etc. This possibility is very valuable and important as you can
organize your page accordingly. Meaning if you see that a certain application
or room is very popular among the visitors you can bring it in the front and
make it bigger. The ones that are not visited much you can put in the end etc.
So analytics plays a great role in any organization and we,
as an ordinary users of the web, should be aware of this tool and use the
opportunity to see the actions done in our WebPages.
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