How education should go in the context of the big data era

"Big data" is one of the hottest concepts today, and some people claim that those who master big data can look down on the whole world like God. As we enter 2012, the term "big data" is being mentioned more and more, and it is used to describe and define the massive amount of data generated in the era of information explosion, and name the technological development and innovation related to it.

Big data refers to information that is so large in size that it cannot be captured, managed, processed, and organized in a reasonable amount of time by mainstream software tools for the purpose of helping businesses make more positive decisions. The innovation of big data develops along the direction from data to big data, then to analysis and mining, and finally to discovery and prediction. With the advent of the cloud era, big data has attracted more and more attention. Various industries are more aware of the fact that whoever can take the lead in realizing big data and whoever digs more y into big data will seize the future opportunities.

The education industry is no exception, and 2013 is a major opportunity for education to move from traditional education research to scientific evidence. It is worth thinking about what big data will bring to education? How to better educate students through big data? Is big data a blessing or a curse for education?

Flipped classroom, MOOC and micro-courses are the first wave of big data to change education

The emergence of flipped classroom, MOOC and micro-courses has changed the traditional education model from the classroom teacher's incessant lectures to the current "video re-education". Students can make their own learning progress according to their personal situation, and teachers can understand the problems encountered by students in their learning according to the situation of students doing problems on the Internet. The traditional classroom no longer explains the new lesson, but becomes a place for students to do homework, explain the problem or do experiments in the classroom.

If the flipped classroom is just a tentacle, then the emergence of MOOC is the sublimation of the flipped classroom. "In 2013, Shanghai took the lead in introducing Chinese-style MOOC by launching the "Shanghai University Course Source***Help Platform". ".

The rise of the MOOC has led to the rapid expansion of the learning model of "re-creating education with video" into higher education, and has progressed to the point where credits can be earned by taking a MOOC and entering formal education. Tsinghua University and Peking University have also opened online education programs.

And micro-courses are a response to the flipped classroom and an indispensable resource for students' independent learning. Microcourses are miniature lessons that concentrate the essence of teaching videos, mainly used for students' pre-study, and at present, microcourses have begun to influence the practice of informatization teaching in primary and secondary schools in China. The accumulation of micro-course practice will lead to the formation of micro-course clusters, and the application of micro-course clusters will form new application data, which will be conducive to the innovative application of big data analysis and mining, discovery and prediction. It can be said that the reform in the field of education, the brunt of the big data change information technology teaching.

Is the era of big data a blessing or a curse for education?

People haven't had time to figure out what the information age is, the data age has come quietly. In front of the idea of big data, we have our own opinions, some people believe that the era of big data can make educators really read the students.

Relative to the traditional data macro education, big data is mainly reflected in the micro level. Big data makes the "empirical" mode of teaching into a "data service" mode of education. Teachers can pay attention to the micro performance of each individual student according to the data, through the analysis of student-related data, targeted adjustments to the education program, so as to achieve personalized education.

Some supporters of big data education believe that education in the era of big data will promote the traditional "teacher-centered" teaching methods to "student-centered" teaching methods to promote the "actor-type" teacher to "student-centered" teaching methods to promote the "actor-type" teacher to "student-centered" teaching methods. "Teachers to "director-type" teachers, from the macro-groups to micro-individuals, for educational researchers, the use of data can be found in the real students.

And another group of people think that big data is "a change of soup but not a change of medicine", in fact, is the use of big data, cloud computing as a concept to package the previous things. Although online education is raging, but there is a "good but not good" attitude. New Oriental, for example, public data show that at the end of 2012, New Oriental online website in the individual registered users has more than 10 million, and according to the new Oriental online vice president Pan Xin, users are willing to pay for the amount is not high, in 2012 the new Oriental paid users for 200,000, accounting for only 2%.

Currently, the mainstream online education products are just offline courses recorded and moved to the line, this model is actually just a simple copy of the offline learning methods, such learning methods also derived from a number of new problems in education: how to ensure that the learning process will not be interrupted, how to determine that the student is the student logged on to learn, etc. The online education system can be used for a variety of purposes, such as learning to learn, learning to learn, learning to learn, and learning to learn. For online education, only students with better learning initiative and control can utilize online learning to achieve good learning results, while those who are weaker in these aspects will be difficult to persist in the long term, and the learning effect can be imagined.