Analytics
Picturehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DARPA_Big_Data.jpg
When looking at the future of education there has been a lot of talk about analytics and what role they will play in how students learn. Many think of analytics as nothing more than statistics that are collected to provide some basic information to administration. This is not the case and we will look at analytics and what role they will play in transforming the future of learning for students. 

Analytics is when data is taken and analyzed so it can be used in a meaningful 
way.  An example of this would be a company like dreambox.com.  Dreambox uses an intelligent adaptive engine in teaching math to students so in addition to marking a question right or wrong, they collect data on how long it took to answer a question, how they answered the question and the structure they used. All of this information is compiled and analyzed. From this, a decision is made whether the student has mastered the concept or not. If they have not mastered the topic, then it is retaught in a different way until the student understands the material and moves on to the next topic. This is an example of using analyzed data in a meaningful way. 
Analytics in Education
Analytics is still in the early stages of use and many of the ideas are nothing more than concepts at this point. Here are some of the ideas of possible uses for analytics:
  1. Adaptive Testing, tracking and reporting: Many of the LMS companies like Pearson, Blackboard and Desire2Learn are all investing in analytics to integrate into their products in their future. A teacher can receive information on activity of students, time spent on assignments and much more data that provides key information to teachers. In addition, adaptive testing can automatically analyze the students' work and personalize the course for the student.
  2. Analytics tools for early alert, intervention and collaboration: Analytics can be used to analyze students' work, time spent on assignments and other criteria to alert a teacher of at-risk students that need additional support. 
  3. Analytics projects for institutional efficiency and effectiveness:  For administration, analytics can be useful to take stats on attendance, funding and other criteria to determine the effectiveness of a specific program. 
Concerns about Analytics
Although analytics are seen as very useful to education, some major concerns exist that need to be addressed before it will be widely accepted. They are:
  1. Funding/Infrastructure - Powerful programs, high bandwidth and cloud computing power are required to manage all of this data. This, of course, comes at a price. With districts struggling to pay for what they have, analytics may only appear on a district's "wish list".
  2. Not genuinely promoting meaningful teaching - Learning is not as simple as answering a few tests and suddenly a student is a master of a topic. There is concern that with analytics only items for which data can be taken will be used to determine importance for learning. For example, what data can be taken from social interaction? Social communication is a powerful learning experience, but without any meaningful data, the benefit of it cannot be analyzed. This negates its importance in analytical outcomes. 
  3. Devaluing the role of teachers/mentors - Teachers would lose the role of the main provider of learning and teaching to take on a role of support.
  4. Disempowering learners -  Instead of learning to find and analyze information on their own, students will learn to be spoon fed information. A direct move away from inquiry based learning.
  5. Devaluing deep learning - If this happens, more emphasis could be placed on superficial indicators instead of assessing if deep learning has occurred. 
  6. Privacy and security - Collecting personal information from students brings up the issue the privacy of the student. As well, security mechanisms need to be in place to protect collected (private) data.

Analytics and Cloud Memory
Although the topic of analytics in education is an interesting topic, what does it have to do with cloud memory? Cloud computing provides the best and cheapest infrastructure from which to process all the data that analytics requires. Cloud memory is going to be one of the main sources from which information/data will be drawn from for use by analytics. All of our data that is stored online is nothing but data that can be searched, analyzed and cross referenced to provide us with a meaningful result.  For this reason cloud memory will always be linked together with analytics.
Big Data
For further information on this topic click on this link.
Discussion Question 1
In what ways do you see learning analytics combined with cloud memory being used in education? Do you foresee problems or issues? How about the benefits? To answer click here.
Conclusion
Many of the concerns about analytics arise from the idea that it will replace teachers and create an education system that is solely reliant on superficial data. We believe that analytics will play an important part in the future of education, but only as one tool that teachers use on a daily basis to teach students. For this reason, we see a benefit from continued research and development of analytics, but understanding the role it will play will be important moving forward.
PictureRetrieved from http://www.learningfrontiers.eu/?q=story/will-analytics-transform-education
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References:

http://commons.wikimedia.org. (2013, 04 20). Retrieved 10 26, 2013, from Wikipedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DARPA_Big_Data.jpg

Bishop, T. (2013, 04 09). GeekWire Radio: How data, technology and analytics are reshaping education. Retrieved 10 26, 2013, from GeekWire: http://www.geekwire.com/2013/geekwire-radio-data-technology-reshaping-education/

Yuan, L. (n.d.). Will Analytics Transform Education? Retrieved 10 26, 2013, from Learning Frontiers: http://www.learningfrontiers.eu/?q=story/will-analytics-transform-education