When Thinking About Data, What Keeps You Up at Night?

• 07/09/24

If suppliers are going to go through the work and, frankly, the cost of creating data-sharing solutions, they need to know what data educators actually want and are capable of consuming. Until multiple institutions ask for data in the same format, suppliers won't invest in the standards.

The 1EdTech community has started taking steps in this direction with the Caliper Analytics® standard and LTI™ Advantage Data initiative. Caliper allows institutions to better understand and visualize learning activity and product usage and present the information in meaningful ways to students, instructors, and advisors. LTI Advantage Data boils the Caliper standard down to the basics, providing suppliers with an easier starting point for providing the data in smaller bites.

When provided in a standardized form, data can also be used to collaborate across an institution or even with other institutions, breaking down silos while also enabling future technologies to advance using standards.

When Institutions Have the Data, Who Gets to See It?

Perhaps the biggest question is once educational institutions have the data, who has permission to access it?

Data and insights can be valuable, but information about students and instructors should not necessarily be available for everyone to see. There are of course privacy laws, policies, and practices to consider, all of which can vary between states and individual institutions.

Suppliers point out that there can't be an infinite number of roles and permissions for each application. At some point, there will need to be a basic understanding of what roles can access what data and what that data can be used for.

It's an ongoing debate, but both institutional leaders and suppliers agree: It is about the learner and improving their outcomes.

Where Does AI Fit in?

As it seems with every technology-based conversation these days, AI was considered as a possible solution and accelerator for making decisions for improvement. Can AI sort through the data and alert the necessary parties when that data needs to be acted upon? Maybe, but more work needs to be done around trust before we can rely on AI.

1EdTech's community is working together to tackle some of the big AI questions. It has released the 1EdTech AI Preparedness Checklist, which provides guiding prompts for establishing protocols, policies, and best practices for using AI in teaching and learning; and the first part of the TrustEd Apps™ Generative AI Data Rubric, a self-assessment tool that provides a foundation for the ethical, productive, and safe use of gen AI data that can be employed by institutions and ed tech suppliers alike.

Working Toward Solutions

There is no question that data can help us get where we want to go in terms of supporting student success. Data can be used to trigger learning support, inform curricular revisions, and design personalized learning. But data needs to be handled with fidelity, protecting student privacy and security. And data needs to be consumable and accessible to stakeholders in a consistent reliable format, so time can be spent on analyzing the data rather than cleansing and formatting it for consumption. Then there is the data repository consideration: Where do we put all of this data? The solutions are in front of us as long as we can continue to have honest conversations and balance innovation with best practices.

Conversations and collaborations will continue in the 1EdTech community, including the Innovative Leadership Network dedicated to Success and Data Analytics, where members from across the country discuss and design resources to support data collection and use. And, of course, save the date for the 2025 Learning Impact Conference, June 2-5.