Educational data mining perspectives within university big data environment

Abstract

All organizations are working nowadays in a very dynamic and strongly competitive environment. In order to survive and remain competitive, they need to take timely, adequate and informed decisions that are based not only on intuition and past experience. The main challenges for data analysis are related with the specific characteristics of “big data” and the availability of suitable analytical tools for knowledge extraction that would support the processes of taking strategic management decisions. While “big data” are already widely available and used in business, there are only rare cases of utilizing “big data” in the educational sector. The main purpose of this paper is to focus on the challenges related to the analytical processing of “big data” generated and stored at higher education institutions. The paper discusses the unique opportunities that Big Data analysis could give for the educational sector development and the improvements that could scale from a single school, to governmental directions and satisfaction of the labor market. However, big data analytics confronts universities with great challenges as well, related to finding appropriate methods and tools for extracting knowledge and patterns from extremely rich and complex data sets, and integrating the insights into a coherent vision for strategic management decisions.