Using Big Data 

The idea of creating a survey with these questions came from research done at Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, in Abu Dhabi in 2015. The researchers were interested in using big data in education to try to predict student academic performance. They believe that predicting students’ academic performance has many benefits, including: 

• being able to provide informed guidance

• early feedback that may help to improve students’ knowledge retention

• improve formal assessment outcomes

• increase satisfaction from the educational experience

•  to identify at-risk students who are likely to fail (Cen et al., 2015) 

 

In their case study, they explored the possibility of a group performance prediction, and they reached an impressive result of over 80% accuracy in grade predictions of 122 students. The input data they used in the learning performance prediction system consisted of basic information, family details, learning history, learning efforts, collaboration, other learning resources, and time spent on leisure. We tried to include some of these questions in the survey that you took.  Even though our group is not here to predict the academic performance of the people that took the survey, nor do we have the expertise to do so, we still thought it would be interesting for you to get a feel for the kind of data that can be collected to make academic performance predictions. We did not include all of the categories and questions outlined in the research, since we wanted to keep the survey short. 

 

If you are interested in more information, you can follow this link to download the research paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304549988_Big_education_Opportunities_for_Big_Data_analytics