New edition of the Open Thoughts blogs
When you send an email or connect to social media, you are generating a huge amount of data, what is known as “big data”. When processed properly using analytical methods and guaranteeing levels of privacy, they can help gain a better idea of what we like and how we behave. Organizations can make the most of these data to offer increasingly personalized services.
This move towards personalized services can already been seen in certain sectors such as business, but it is now also gaining ground in the field of education. Indeed, one of the aims of the new Open Thoughts blog is to invite debate among international experts on the impact of big data and analytics in a range of sectors, and education in particular. Published in English, the blog looks to answer the question are Big Data & Analytics shaping a smarter society? and to analyse the advantages and disadvantages of these technologies.
Via their virtual campuses, universities and education institutions can collect large quantities of data on their students’ preferences, interactions and opinions. As Ángel A. Juan, lecturer in the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications Department and researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), explains in the blog’s first entry by using techniques known as “learning analytics”, “these data can be analysed to identify learning difficulties and offer better support and guidance at the right time, thus contributing to improving the quality of the educational service offered”. Juan and Julià Minguillón, another lecturer from the department and a researcher at the eLearn Center, are the people behind the blog.
Coordinated by the UOC’s Knowledge Transfer and Research Support Office (OSRT), the blog also aims to look at the needs and opportunities accompanying big data and analytics in terms of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. Can they help improve or incentivize education in these areas? Do these techniques allow institutions to offer students a more personalized service? Do they help us train the citizens of the future? These are some of the questions that the blog will attempt to answer. The blog is one of the activities being organized to celebrate the UOC’s twentieth anniversary.
The initiative
Open Thoughts is an initiative organized annually by the OSRT focusing on one area of research, development and innovation at the UOC. The subject is then analysed by world-renowned experts. It was first organized in 2012 and looked at gender and ICTs. Some thirty international figures answered the question: what if Steve Jobs had been a woman?. The initiative’s second blog was published in 2013 and looked at the question of whether we were ready for a smarter world?. Last year’s blog asked how many peers does it take to change a light bulb? in order to encourage debate on the so-called peer production.