Last week’s innovation lunches were about the future of education and technology, with featured speakers Kris Steinhoff (formerly of ITS) from the Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) presenting at both lunches, and Ryan Henyard from MSIS (Medical School Information Systems) able to present at the first lunch.
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| Attendees at the Boyer lunch ask questions of Kris and Ryan (seated, right) |
Big data seems like the (current) future of education!
Many of the goals outlined by both MSIS and DIG involve using large quantities of data available about students to help them succeed in college and in their future careers.
DIG aims to support innovative work by U-M faculty, scaling and funding prototypes and small-scale solutions developed by faculty and making them more broadly available across campus (and even beyond!).
They’re working to develop three tools more fully:
- ECoach, a tailored communications tool targeted at helping support student success.
- ART, or academic reporting toolkit, which is used to visualize data.
- Student Explorer, used by advisors as an early warning system to gauge student engagement.
MSIS is working to transform medical education, which hasn’t changed much in the last century. The goals of the transformation include:
- Building a more “responsive” medical student.
- Shifting toward a more predictive model for med student success.
- Preparing the student for the future, not the year that they are in school, since med school lasts so long. Students graduating in 2015 are expected to have their own practice in 2030
These initiatives are grant-funded and research-based currently, which allows the successes of the programs to be scientifically examined to see if they produce measurable results for students, and the successes should be well-established in order to grow beyond grant funding.
Naturally, data privacy, security, and ethics around the use of student data was discussed.
- Data privacy is important as student education record data is federally regulated as FERPA data. The sensitivity and privacy of the data are already being protected in some of these tools. In ART, data won’t be displayed for classes of 20 students or less, because the aggregate data could be de-anonymized at that small scale. The Safe Computing website offers more general guidance on Handling University Data.
- Data security is considered as well, with data for the DIG tools being stored in the Data Warehouse, which is approved for storing most sensitive data types.
- Data access is controlled as well, with logs to monitor and later audit access to data, and roles and permissions to restrict access to various types and levels of data.
- Ethical frameworks guiding data protection and use are increasingly important. For example, MSIS requires that data be used to support student performance and retention.
It’s likely that expectations of privacy and data restrictions will shift in the future, and data access could become more open. What do you think about this direction for the future of education?
