Dataconomy
  • News
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cybersecurity
    • DeFi & Blockchain
    • Finance
    • Gaming
    • Startups
    • Tech
  • Industry
  • Research
  • Resources
    • Articles
    • Guides
    • Case Studies
    • Glossary
    • Whitepapers
  • Newsletter
  • + More
    • Conversations
    • Events
    • About
      • About
      • Contact
      • Imprint
      • Legal & Privacy
      • Partner With Us
Subscribe
No Result
View All Result
  • AI
  • Tech
  • Cybersecurity
  • Finance
  • DeFi & Blockchain
  • Startups
  • Gaming
Dataconomy
  • News
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cybersecurity
    • DeFi & Blockchain
    • Finance
    • Gaming
    • Startups
    • Tech
  • Industry
  • Research
  • Resources
    • Articles
    • Guides
    • Case Studies
    • Glossary
    • Whitepapers
  • Newsletter
  • + More
    • Conversations
    • Events
    • About
      • About
      • Contact
      • Imprint
      • Legal & Privacy
      • Partner With Us
Subscribe
No Result
View All Result
Dataconomy
No Result
View All Result

Big Data in education: Can our past dictate our future?

byDavid Koch
March 24, 2014
in Articles

This article is based on an excerpt of  Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Kenneth Cukier.

Big Data in Education

What if data collected during your journey through education was collected and stored? What if the records would forever show that you had to take a class to catch up on math skills in college? Or even already in school? Universities could potentially tap into this data and optimize their admissions so as to attempt to inflate the later grades at graduation.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Kenneth Cukier, Data journalist at The Economist, consider this to be a perfectly plausible future scenario. Already today they register calls for a more transparent usage of a student’s transcript. Adaptive learning algorithms, for example, could then both identify the weaker students and then induce them to quit early on to improve later overall performance.

Stay Ahead of the Curve!

Don't miss out on the latest insights, trends, and analysis in the world of data, technology, and startups. Subscribe to our newsletter and get exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.

The value Big Data in education may bear

Clearly there are many advantages to adding a quantifiable element to education, giving both the student and their teacher tools to more specifically improve their performance. But for every advantage there are also risks.

For fear that their children’s data would be saved forever, parents managed to halt a Gates Foundation backed initiative to store educational data in six out of nine states chosen for an initial launch. Since big data in education could also include information on sick days, visits to the counselor or even the depth of understanding reached for a given book, the ability to recall specifics on all these metrics bears a threatening potential for many. The inability to shed our past thus bears dangers because it prevents us from outgrowing past mistakes that were part of our learning experiences: no aspect of our development would be under the radar anymore.

 Protecting the student’s privacy

In many countries privacy protection laws exist specifically to prevent any such nasty surprises. The idea is that creators of data could opt-in to the positive uses of collecting this data (such as individualized learning) without the negative consequences. Unfortunately the true allure behind Big Data is the secondary use of gathered information: the possibility to find some meaning in data that was collected for completely different purposes. As a result, any opt-in that was consented to is hardly able to foresee the uses that the collected data will eventually have.

In response to this fear the EU and the US have already started discussing the possible ways of placing the burden of protecting the data collected on individuals on those wishing to use it for secondary or tertiary purposes. The onus of preventing any misuse of the data would therefore be on whoever collected and stored it.

The ultimate question is how the tradeoff between the dangers and the opportunities Big Data in education can bring can be navigated. Many positive examples of improvals in the individual learning experience already exist. At the University of Arizona implementing a software designed to help students graduate increased the percentage of students passing onto their next years of studies from 77% to 84%. More examples of this nature are most certainly desirable but they should not move us into a direction where our past rather than our will determines our future.

Tags: educationmayer-schönbergersurveillance

Related Posts

From imaging to staffing: 5 ways AI is changing healthcare

From imaging to staffing: 5 ways AI is changing healthcare

October 5, 2025
AI agents are here—Make them your media-buying back office

AI agents are here—Make them your media-buying back office

October 5, 2025
DOT Miners Combine XRP and DeFi to Earn with a Passive Income Model, Bringing Crypto to a Head

DOT Miners Combine XRP and DeFi to Earn with a Passive Income Model, Bringing Crypto to a Head

September 24, 2025
Best ELD devices and fleet management tools 2025: Top picks for trucking companies

Best ELD devices and fleet management tools 2025: Top picks for trucking companies

September 18, 2025
Zen Media and Optimum7 Merge to Create AI-Native Growth Agency: Why Data Is at the Core

Zen Media and Optimum7 Merge to Create AI-Native Growth Agency: Why Data Is at the Core

September 18, 2025
How wedding photographers save hours with SoftOrbits batch editing

How wedding photographers save hours with SoftOrbits batch editing

September 11, 2025
Please login to join discussion

LATEST NEWS

Verizon down: Latest Verizon outage map for service issues

A critical Oracle zero-day flaw is being actively abused by hackers

Microsoft Copilot can now create documents and search your Gmail

Google Messages is about to get a lot smarter with this AI tool

Here is how WhatsApp will let you display your Facebook account

The Windows 10 doomsday clock is ticking for 500 million users

Dataconomy

COPYRIGHT © DATACONOMY MEDIA GMBH, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • About
  • Imprint
  • Contact
  • Legal & Privacy

Follow Us

  • News
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Cybersecurity
    • DeFi & Blockchain
    • Finance
    • Gaming
    • Startups
    • Tech
  • Industry
  • Research
  • Resources
    • Articles
    • Guides
    • Case Studies
    • Glossary
    • Whitepapers
  • Newsletter
  • + More
    • Conversations
    • Events
    • About
      • About
      • Contact
      • Imprint
      • Legal & Privacy
      • Partner With Us
No Result
View All Result
Subscribe

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy Policy.