Big Data in Higher Education: Research Methods and Analytics Supporting the Learning Journey

One of the promises of mining big data for insights in higher education is to enable a new level of evidence-based research into learning and teaching. The broader term data science, which can be applied to many types and kinds of data big and small, captures a theoretical and methodological sea change occurring in educational and social science research methods that is situated apart from or perhaps between traditional qualitative and quantitative methods (Gibson and Ifenthaler 2017; Gibson and Webb 2015). Today, due to the fine-grained data captured during digital learning, it is possible to gain highly detailed insight into student performance and learning trajectories as required for personalizing and adapting curriculum as well as assessment (Baker and Yacef 2009). …