When Thinking About Data, What Keeps You Up at Night?
- By Suzanne Carbonaro
- 07/09/24
With great technology comes great responsibility.
The proliferation of technology in education means we have more data about how, what and if students are learning than ever before. The question is, how do we ensure that data gets into the hands of the people who can use it to improve teaching and learning, without invading a student or educator's privacy?
What we hear from the 1EdTech community is that, ideally, educational institutions want their data centralized, as opposed to a patchwork of homegrown tools and supplier solutions. They want to access their data in one place, when they need it, so they can spend time consuming and using the data rather than formatting it to make it actionable. This also gives them more time to collaborate internally and externally with stakeholders.
"If we can have the data from our entire portfolio available in a standardized format, it allows us to focus on supporting student success and gaining a better understanding of our learners, rather than making the data interoperable at the campus level," said Steven Williams, principal product manager for UCLA.
These ideas were discussed in several sessions at the recent 2024 1EdTech Learning Impact Conference in Salt Lake City between 1EdTech member suppliers, higher education institutions, and K-12 districts. So, what questions keep both educators and suppliers up at night as they consider ways to make these needs a reality?
How Do Educators Get the Data?
Right now, most ed tech applications capture metadata; but accessing that data, ensuring student privacy, or understanding how that data is stored is often unclear. Some of these applications provide educators with data that could support student success through dashboards. Dashboards can be helpful to an extent, but they don't pull multiple tools' data together in one location. So, if an educator wants a full picture of a student, they need to log into multiple tools to get the various data points available. And that data is likely to export into different formats, making it difficult to consume and use for improvement.
In other cases, institutional leaders leverage data standards, such as those created by 1EdTech or other standards organizations, which cull data together into one standard format, across all applications, so they can review all the data in one place, in one single format. Dashboards allow educators to slice and dice the data, and analyze the data across applications longitudinally. This effective use of data for improvement has led 1EdTech community members to want more from their ed tech suppliers. They need more suppliers to upgrade their tools to meet industry standards, so they can access this data in consumable formats for improvement.
So, What Data Do Educators Need?
As Warren Goetzel, director of academic technology and engagement at Georgia Institute of Technology, points out, "To best understand what data educators need we should be asking them directly. At Georgia Tech we interviewed a wide range of stakeholders including faculty to get a baseline understanding of their needs related to learning data and learning analytics. It is also important to ascertain not just what data they need, but what problems would data help solve."
To that end, ed tech suppliers point out that there is a lot of data available, and not every institution is ready to store all of that data itself. This is the harsh reality; data warehouses and the expertise in maintaining them are expensive, and not every institution has the funds or infrastructure to do so.