By Susan Grajek, Vice President for data, research and analytics, EDUCAUSE.
Big data and analytics are reshaping everything. Industry is using them to great effect, to better understand markets and customers, manage supply chains, and increase profits. Personalized medicine, fueled by analytics applied to big data, is poised to revolutionize healthcare. Higher education lags several paces behind these fields. Some institutions are demonstrating improvements in retention and degree completion, but most are still using data to monitor student outcomes and activities rather than predict or proactively intervene.
Certainly, trends related to analytics and data are influencing institutional IT strategy, more so than other types of trends EDUCAUSE tracks, including those related to teaching and learning and security and risk1. Data-driven decision-making, enterprise data management, and data integration issues are all already incorporated into or exerting a major influence on emerging IT strategy in at least half of US colleges and universities. Personalized learning, however, is only this influential at one in five institutions.
