Educating data

Personalized Learning

Recommender and adaptive systems have been around for quite a while, both in and outside of education. Krishna Madhavan is an Associate Professor at Purdue and was a Visiting Research Scientist in Microsoft Research; he works on generating new visual analytic approaches to dealing with a variety of data—in particular educational data. He says, “The question is, there is a lot of work that has happened on intelligent tutors, recommender systems, automatic grading systems, and so on. So what’s the big deal now?”

One answer is that, now, industry and research are developing personalized adaptive recommender systems around more open-ended, complex environments and information. Nigel Green is Chief Data Scientist at Dreambox Learning. They provide an adaptive learning platform for mathematics, primarily aimed at elementary school students. He describes it this way, “So many companies are looking at how many questions you got right or wrong. We actually care far less about whether the student gets the question right or wrong. We care about how they got their answer. That’s the part that we’re adapting on.” Independent research studies comparing learning the same content with Dreambox’s approach to other adaptive approaches have confirmed Green’s idea.

Green’s description of how they achieve this goal is important to understanding how personalized learning works.

As Green describes, every lesson in Dreambox targets small pieces of information or techniques, i.e., the knowledge students need to succeed in that area of mathematics. Dreambox calls these micro-objectives. For example, it is important that young students develop a basic understanding of numbers and what they mean. Green describes a task for younger grades this way, “Can you make the number 6?” Dreambox assesses this with multiple smaller tasks that target the micro-objectives, for example dragging 6 balls into a shape and choosing the number six on a number line. Green says, “Those are two separate processes. And two separate questions that we’re asking. One, can you actually move six balls in the right boxes, in the right order, and in the right locations. And then can you recognize the number 6 in the line below.” In this way, Dreambox can assess each micro-objective separately. Following that, they can compare each student’s state of knowledge to the average of all students their age who have completed the task, or the average of students who performed similarly to that student when they started using Dreambox, or the average of all students who are in remedial math. This allows them to direct students to the correct next task to maximize their learning. As Green says, “There are different ways of slicing and dicing those numbers. We want to make sure that we’ve got that student trending in their specific area. And then we can say, ‘You know what, this student is taking nearly 2 standard deviations longer than the average student.’” If the student has done that repeatedly, Dreambox knows they haven’t mastered the target content. At that point, they could increase the level of assistance provided to the student. In another case, a student might be taking so much longer than the average for their group that they will be unlikely to finish the lesson. At that point, Green says, “We might gracefully exit them out and take them to another lesson that practices content prior to or provides additional scaffolding for this lesson. In some cases, we move them sideways; we may have a lesson that’s teaching or assessing exactly the same content in a different context. It may be that the student is not familiar with one context, or is more comfortable with one than another.”

This is important for other businesses because so much of what we base the development of recommendation systems on is simplistic information. There are plenty of places where that is the right choice. In some cases, however (for example, in personalized health care), it may be better to follow Madhavan’s and Dreambox’s methods when developing algorithms and techniques, using more in-depth information to achieve an accurate picture. Piotr Mitros is Chief Data Scientist at edX, a provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience. As he says, “The first course that we taught, a course was typically 20 hours a week, for about 14 or 16 weeks. That’s a couple hundred hours of interaction. That is similar to video gaming companies, or to companies like Google perhaps. But it’s not similar to most traditional industries where a person comes onto your website, interacts a little bit, and then leaves.”

Another important way that what’s happening now is different is that products build-in recommendation rather than just modeling what is likely to become a problem. Dave Kil, Chief Scientist at Civitas Learning, calls the latter the Forensic approach to education: “It’s like we look at the patient and explain why he died, rather than analyzing and modeling the data to return it to the users in actionable form.”

Another approach to personalized learning is tackling the entire college experience. Civitas Learning integrates many of the data sources that colleges and universities have available—e.g., Learning Management System (LMS) data, administrative data, and data on grades and attendance—creates predictive models based on the outcomes an institution has identified as most important to them—e.g., students graduating faster or more students passing introductory math courses—and then provides real-time feedback to students, instructors, and administrators to help the institution discover which interventions work best to reach those goals. They point to several important lessons they’ve learned along the way. One is the value of iterating until you get it right. Mark Milliron says, “some of our most exciting projects are projects that involve people testing trying, testing trying, testing trying until you really get that they’ve learned how to iterate.” Civitas has had some of its best results with clients who pursue this sort of iteration. Another important lesson is not believing in the one-size-fits-all solution. As Milliron says, “Our second big challenge is really trying to solve the problem (for the college or university). A lot of people are trying to sell solutions they have developed—instead of solving a problem, they’re trying to sell a solution.”

Overall, current results are showing that personalized adaptive approaches are improving student learning and helping them navigate the complex world of college to graduate sooner and have a better probability of graduating. This area is likely to grow quickly as schools explore blended learning models and new companies pop up every year. These personalized adaptive approaches rely on being able to detect what students are learning on the fly, in real time, as they engage in learning activity. This leads to our next theme addressing automated assessment of learning.

No More Tests

There’s no question that this goal is far off. However, it is exciting to think about the possibilities. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could actually watch people do things and have some records of how they’re actually doing them and relate what they’re doing to the kinds of things they do or do not know?” as Matthew Berland puts it. Berland is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researching learning from games and other engaging and complex environments. This is particularly exciting if it can be done in many of the evolving transformative learning environments such as games or even makerspaces.

The movement to reach this goal has been underway for some time, and there has been a lot of progress in the more structured environments Madhavan discusses. The struggle that presents, as Piotr Mitros, Chief Data Scientist at edX, points out, is that, “We’re not yet really doing a good job of translating data into measurements of the types of skills we try to teach. We have some proxies for complex skills—such as answers to conceptual questions and simple problem solving ability—but they’re limited. Right now, we have data on everything the student has done.” With these data, Mitros and others hope to be able to find out more about complex problem solving, mathematical reasoning, persistence, and many skills employers mention as important, such as collaboration and clear communication while working on a team.

More open-ended environments present challenges in understanding the relationship between what people do and what they know. One challenge is capturing and integrating data. Clickstream data from environments is a common first step, but as Justin Reich from HarvardX, one of the partner institutions for edX, says, “You can have terabytes of information about what people have clicked and still not know a lot about what’s going on inside their heads.” In addition, Berland points out that, “There are missing aspects there (i.e., in clickstream data alone). Not least of which, what were their hands doing? What’s going on with their face? What else is going on in the room?” It can be important to understand the context around the learning activity as well at what happens on the backend.

New efforts, such as Berland’s ADAGE environment, aim to make these challenges easier. Berland says, “ADAGE is our backend system. It’s something we agreed on as a way to format play data, live play data. We also have an implementation of a server and a client system across formats like Unity, JavaScript, and a few others. The basic idea is ‘Let’s come to some common representations of how play data look. Then we have a set of tools that work with our ADAGE server, which is on our open-source software side of this.”

It is exciting to think that more and more we will have the opportunity to directly assess what people know from what they do, rather than having to assess it by proxy based on their performance on tests. This will open up more possibilities for online learning and the wide deployment of complex engaging learning environments. We address this increasing access to learning opportunities next.

Access to Learning Opportunities

One of the greatest examples of the promise of big data for education is unprecedented access to learning opportunities. MOOCs are an example of a type of these opportunities. Organizations such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX offer courses ranging from Data Science to Epidemiology to the Letters of Paul, a Divinity School course.

As Justin Reich of HarvardX explains, “edX is a nonprofit organization that was created by Harvard and MIT. They provide a learning management system and then they create a storefront for courses on that learning management system and market those courses. So it’s the individual university institutional partners who actually create the open online courses. HarvardX is one of those partners.” The use of these courses has been significant. Reich says that, “In the past 2 years between Harvard and MIT, we’ve run 68 courses. They’ve had about 3 million people who’ve registered.” Frequently, the image of these people has been either college students or people who already have a college degree. While this may be a largely true, Reich explains a more complex picture, “We now have an increasingly clear sense that in many of our courses many people already have a bachelor’s degree; our median age is about 28. But we have people who are 13 years old. We have people who are octogenarians. And sometimes, even when groups are small percentages they can still be large numbers. So the about 30,000 of those users come from the UN’s list of least-developed countries.”

Mitros and Reich both described how many MOOCs are now attempting to incorporate features of the personalized and open-ended, complex learning environments discussed earlier. Building-in tools to recognize what type of student a participant is critical here as so many different groups are participating in MOOCs. As Reich describes, currently, “Virtually every MOOC is sort of a one course for everyone kind of thing.” He points out that this is problematic because it does not take into account multiple factors that we know affect learning, such as expertise in the course material, learner preferences, or learner goals in taking the course. To address the problem, Reich has been developing plans for a “recommender engine which would basically try to understand, for a particular course, what are not only the pathways of people who are successful but if we are to look at people across really important different dimensions; people who come in with high or low familiarity or high or low English language fluency. Then we ask, for different values of those characteristics, what are the pathways that successful people have taken? What do the most persistent learners do when they encounter difficulty or make errors? From that historical data and from what we know about how human learning works, can we recommend to folks what would be the effective strategies for when they get stuck.”

At the same time, maintaining access while improving these courses is a key concern for MOOC providers. Reich: “There’s a real tension between designing learning experiences that take full advantage of fast broadband access, and there’s some cool things that you can build if you take advantage of that. But if you build those kinds of things, you may actually be cutting out many people in the world for whom watching a YouTube video or using a really complex simulation is a huge broadband cost. We need to think about that if we really want to serve people all around the world.”

The promise of increasing access to a huge variety of learning experiences for lots of people and having many of those experiences adapt to learners’ needs has great potential to transform education and improve outcomes for many students. Reaching this promise will involve addressing some key challenges however, and next we turn to those.

Privacy and Security of Student Data

Concerns over student privacy protection have increased in recent years. As an indicator of the times, just in the past month, Congress has introduced three new bills that address student data privacy. Some of this concern seems to be based on a lack of general knowledge about what is already clear from federal policies such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). For example, all of those interviewed for this study have clear policies in place that follow FERPA standards. However, another problem is that FERPA was developed in the pre-digital age, and many feel that the guidelines do not address some critical issues for new types of data and new storage and analysis methods.

Part of the challenge involved in updating standards and practices around student data is technical. But a much larger problem is that what seems to be missing is a wide understanding of the value proposition of the promise of benefits of using data to improve outcomes for students, parents, schools, and teachers. It is the perspective of balancing usefulness of the data for helping people in huge ways and the real risks around data use and sharing. Governor Bob Wise is at the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy and policy organization. For twenty years, their mission has been “that every child graduates from high school ready for college and career.” They have been involved with high school reform and standards. Increasingly, as more educational products used in school are offered digitally, they have become involved in policy around student data. Governor Wise says that, “the best way to engage, at least for us, is to paint a basic picture of how a day in the life in a school room looks different when a teacher is using data effectively to benefit children—and the best messenger for that is the teacher saying ‘This is how I use data.’” Overall, we are facing a cultural change in how we use data and how others use our data. This issue cuts across industries and sectors of the economy and is rapidly unfolding.

As folks on the more technical side of the issue point out, however, there is hope. There are technologies in place that have worked for other industries and groups. Ari Gesher is a Software Engineer and Privacy Wonk at Palantir and coauthor of the recent book, The Architecture of Privacy (O’Reilly). Palantir provides platforms for integrating, managing, securing, and analyzing data at a large scale. He says, “the trade off between effectiveness of a system and the ability to preserve privacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition.” He further asks, “What would it take to create an atmosphere where the anxiety around privacy risks is reduced to the point where data can be shared amongst institutions and researchers for the betterment of education while, at the same time, increasing the overall safety and privacy of the students about whom the data is recorded?” He points out that most data sharing in education currently is done by actually providing a de-identified copy of the dataset, but that we know that anonymization is fraught with issues. A better route is through providing access to data that the second party never actually has in their possession. Gesher: “Modern cloud-hosting environments are a cost-effective way to create such environments. An environment like this could not only include places to hold datasets, but also the analysis tools, instrumented for auditing, for people to work with the data.” You need a combination of two things: you need access control to make sure that authorized people can see what they need to see, and that there are different levels of access rather than having an all-or-nothing model of access to data. On top of that, because any kind of access, even legitimate access, does represent a privacy risk, you need to have good auditing and oversight capabilities.”

Data-Driven Decision Making

Providing a dashboard or other representation of what students are doing and learning is great, but what does a teacher or parent or student do with that information? That information is only helpful insofar as it can be used to affect critical outcomes. Building capacity for a variety of stakeholders to engage in data-driven decision making in education is a critical challenge to be met to fully realize the potential of big data for education.