WASHINGTON — Colleges and universities must make better use of the vast amount of student data that is available in order to bring about more timely graduations for all students, a data mining expert exhorted his colleagues Monday at an annual gathering of education researchers.
“Equal access should also focus not only on enrollment but completion,” said Huzefa Rangwala, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science And Engineering at George Mason University.
Rangwala is principal investigator for a $766,000 “big data” project funded by the National Science Foundation to use data analytics to find “actionable insights” to boost college success.
Rangwala shared lessons from the project Monday during a panel about using “big data on campus” at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The conference drew a record 16,000 attendees, organizers said.
Among other things, Rangwala said institutions of higher learning should be looking for ways to develop course recommendation programs that mimic how Netflix — a movie and TV series streaming service — recommends movies based on the person’s user profile.
“Even if you disagree it will still try to force that movie on you,” Rangwala said, arguing that course selection platforms could be designed the same way.
Guided suggested that course selection is important because students may try to take courses that they are not ready for based on their prior grades and the courses they’ve taken thus far.
