Matthew Williams

As learning increasingly moves toward the digital landscape, the role of data is also coming under more scrutiny. Every time a student browses the Internet or uses an app for learning, trace data is created, and thus the potential to use it for the benefit of that student.

A slew of companies and products offer the promise of collecting data to help educators, but there are still major concerns about how that data will be used, including issues around student privacy and teacher evaluations.

Reynol Junco, faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is studying the role of data in education, and says the potential for using learning analytics for students’ benefit is far from being realized. Using data as formative assessment — providing feedback to students in incremental steps rather than with big tests like mid-terms or finals — can be helpful to both students and teachers, he says.

“I think of learning analytics as the ultimate formative assessment. We’re always talking in education about how formative assessments are very important. It’s important to assess frequently and to make adjustments,” he said recently on NPR’s Tell Me More. “We’ve got data well before a student will flunk a first exam or a quiz and so we can make some predictions about the things that they’re doing and how we might intervene before we get to that point.

Junco sees potential for trace data to further individualize learning, or at the very least help educators understand how their students use the Internet.“It’s collecting large amounts of data to identify patterns that will help tailor education more precisely for each child,” Junco said. “Some of my research has already shown that we can use things like how much time students spend on Facebook and what they do on Facebook to predict academic outcomes,” Junco said. In that study [PDF] he learned that students who use Facebook in class to socialize have lower GPAs.

[RELATED READING: What Does Your School Know About You?]

But Junco also understands the dark side of data. When it comes to small kids using mobile apps to play games, Junco believes data collection for the purposes of companies tracking children’s locations and activities goes too far.

“Such tracking builds profiles of children (their likes, dislikes, browsing habits, etc.) for insidious forms of marketing,” he wrote in response to the December report, Mobile Apps for Kids, by the Federal Trade Commission about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requirements.

That report found that 59 percent of the 400 apps reviewed some infromation from the user’s mobile device back to the developer or to a third party. And only 20 percent of apps disclosed information about how they collect data.

As gathering data about student performance becomes a bigger priority in education, schools are faced with different choices on how to capture that data. A slew of tech companies offer a variety of products they’ve developed for schools, but some school districts are creating their own data systems.

California-based charter network Aspire Public Schools is one of them. The school created a data system called Schoolzilla, a web-based data platform that is now available to any school who wants to use it for free. Teachers or administrators can sign up at Schoolzilla to get started. Aspire offers implementation of the system for a fee. So far, there isn’t a set price for the service; it depends on the degree of help each school needs to set it up.

The data tool, originally developed three years ago, allows teachers to synthesize data from multiple sources and create reports. Teachers can see whether the entire class is struggling on a particular math standard, for example, or whether specific students are falling behind. The idea is to help teachers decide what tack to take with individual students.

But academic performance numbers aren’t the only data captured. Since the platform accesses multiple databases at once, teachers can compare things like student absenteeism to their grades. Or they can compare students’ grades to their scores on standardized tests in the same subject. Or they can compare the frequency of calls home with the number of disciplinary actions needed at school.

“Teachers spent hours pulling data out of the attendance system, then the gradebook, then the tests, then matching it all together in massive Excel spreadsheets,” said Anna Utgoff, Aspires’ director of learning technology. “It was a ridiculous thing for teachers … to be spending their time on. We’re putting this all on a really flexible reporting platform, so we can make 100 versions,” of new reports depending on what teachers request, Utgoff said.

“Having all those reports at their fingertips gives [teachers] more time to plan and teach,” Utgoff added.

Aspire created Schoolzilla with funds from a combination of philanthropic donations, revenue earned by implementing the full data system in several districts across the country, and a $3.1 million Investing in Innovation grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Like Aspire, Rocketship Education, a charter network with schools in Silicon Valley and across the country, has developed its own data system. And Aspire might spin off Schoolzilla into an independent start-up, much like LearnZillion, a for-profit education video site that was incubated at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington.

Learning Analytics: Leveraging Education Data – An infographic by the team at Open Colleges

Over the next few months, a handful of states will take early steps to try to solve a problem that’s become a by-product of the digital age: navigating the flood of student data.

Right now, all sorts of student data are being kept in everything from testing programs and instructional software to grade books and learning management systems. But the data are often trapped in the program and not easily extracted or combined with other data on the same student, creating the educational equivalent of the Hotel California: data can check in any time it likes, but it can never leave. Or be used effectively by teachers.

So a new initiative, supported by state education leaders and funded by prominent foundations, plans to provide a place in the cloud for each state to store all data for every student, using “free” open source software. And, in the process, student achievement information will be connected to instructional apps and web resources. That is, as long as the effort can address concerns about technology, privacy, and whether enough education companies will want to build products for a system that could undermine parts of their own businesses.

In a nutshell, this describes the complicated Shared Learning Infrastructure, being built by the near-namesake Shared Learning Collaborative.

The SLI has had low visibility so far. Started in 2011, encouraged by the Council of Chief State School Officers (the state superintendents of public instruction group that was one of the driving forces behind the Common Core State Standards), and funded by the Carnegie Corporation and Gates Foundation, the SLC has signed on nine states with the promise of creating a less expensive, more connected way to store student data with the potential to make student learning more personal.

WHERE WOULD THE DATA GO?

Perhaps the best way to understand the SLI initiative – this nuts-and-bolts, multi-state, grand-vision education technology project that just went into its pilot alpha release – is to visualize plumbing. Think of twin buckets in the cloud:

1. The main part of the Shared Learning Infrastructure is a huge, carefully structured bucket: the data store/warehouse, which holds, well, a bucket-load of student data across grades and subjects, such as individual student names, demographic information, discipline history, grades, test results, teachers, attendance, graduation requirements, even detail of standards mastered.

This is all data that schools already have, but it’s not necessarily stored all in the same place, in the same way (think of the historic tech disconnect of Beta vs. VHS videotape formats), or even synched and easily available when it’s needed. SLI is designed to serve all these needs and be based on technology that will be open source, free for states and districts to use, modify and share — all appealing to administrators.

2. A second, companion bucket inside SLI is information about instructional content and materials. But it doesn’t hold the instructional resources themselves. This bucket provides pointers to the resources everywhere on the web, leveraging tagging and indexes of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative and U.S. Department of Education Learning Registry. And these resources, through the pointers, are aligned to the new Common Core standards. That alignment provides a connection between the instructional materials and the student test data in the first, big bucket.

3. The third part isn’t another bucket. It’s spigots and faucets that stick out of the buckets – the APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces. APIs are simply a way for school administration, instructional and assessment software outside of the bucket to receive a flow of information from inside the bucket and pour its own back in. This is what the school, teachers and students primarily work with: the software that works with the SLI, connected by the APIs.

The hope is that schools and students will be able to benefit when these pieces are connected. If a student changes schools, either by moving from one grade to another or simply moving, that student’s data would follow her in a consistent format (assuming the new school is also in a state that uses the SLI). Then, it’s theoretically easier to understand a student’s — or even an entire student group’s — performance over time throughout their educational career, because all of that granular data, regardless of grade, is in one bucket.

Teachers and students could also benefit through easier-to-personalize instruction – a holy grail of education technology. Since the bucket of student data is explicitly tied to the Common Core standards, and the second bucket of content in the SLI is also tied to the same Common Core, connecting the two could create a clearer path to what needs to be learned based on what a student has shown he or she (or a group of students with similar learning patterns) does, or doesn’t, understand. As Brandt Redd, senior technology officer for education programs at the Gates Foundation, noted in a presentation at an education industry conference, SLI is part of the cycle, “How did I do? What don’t I know? How do I learn this? … That data isn’t getting back to the teachers and students.”

For their part, the pilot districts in the initial states see practical appeal in having one place to store and pull data rather than try to extract it from multiple administration, instructional and testing programs, all of which may not play nicely together. Tom Stella, assistant superintendent of Everett Public Schools in Massachusetts, summed up his district’s perspective at a Software and Information Industry Association SLC workshop this spring in San Francisco: “The fewer places I have to go to get assessment data,” the better.

CARROTS AND STICKS FOR EDUCATION COMPANIES

But there are still a number of issues that remain before the spigots can be turned on. One of the biggest, of course, is that the technology all works, which is the point of a new developer’s Sandbox that lets companies test applications.

A second is the privacy and security of student data. On its website, the SLI prominently addresses this concern by stating that states, districts and schools “retain ownership and control of their data,” any existing privacy and security policies will continue, and it’ll be the districts — not the SLC — that will determine which apps get data access.” The SLC adds that it’s building the technology so schools using it can be in compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

A third is how many education companies will build products that connect to the SLI and take advantage of its features.

This last piece isn’t a small detail. It’s pretty clear that the SLI could easily replace a good part of the data back end of a number of products, including student information systems. (One SLC official estimated, very cautiously, that 10-20% of such products are related to storing data.) Having ready-built student data storage could also make it easier for some companies to compete with those who already offer their own proprietary “personalized” products that they’ve engineered independently, and cause those companies to lose a competitive leg up.

With the education industry, SLC is using both the carrot and the stick. The carrot is the official stance.

“Students aren’t going to have a great educational experience (simply) because you solved the data problem again,” said Gates’ Sharren Bates at the Software and Information Industry Association’s Ed Tech Industry Summit this spring.

Instead, she urged, let the SLC solve the data storage problem one more time, and let the industry focus on the tools that use it. Other advantages being touted to the industry are that early-stage and established companies will no longer have to figure out how to integrate their software with data software used by each district and state – as long as the software works with the SLI’s APIs, it will work.

The stick appears to be coming from the pilot states and districts themselves. At the same San Francisco workshop, at least one of three state and district representatives implied they wouldn’t even look at a product that didn’t work with the SLI once they start using it. But the promise for companies is based on the assumption that enough states and districts beyond the pilot phase will adopt it, creating a critical mass of potential customers to make education technology developers want to pay attention.

A myriad of other issues include how software that interacts with the SLI will be approved (both as a technical and policy matter) and who will approve it, the computing power and bandwidth required of schools, and – key – who will pay to maintain the Infrastructure and do new SLI development after it’s launched and foundation financial support ends.

The SLC has made it clear it’s aware of these issues and appears to be working in a similarly low-key-yet-persistent way to address them. In the meantime, its SLI has gone into alpha release as of late June and plans a final release in December 2012 (assuming the Mayans don’t intrude). Committed to take part in the pilot are at least one school district in each of Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, North Carolina and Colorado, to be followed by Louisiana, Georgia, Delaware and Kentucky.

It’ll likely be some time in 2013 before we find out if the SLI will fully complete that complicated waterworks – or if it will become a fancy set of publicly owned buckets, attractive and exciting in design, but with spigots that remain closed because no one has constructed pipes to accept and renew the flow of data.

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes the regular Practical Nerd column for GeekWire.

Flickr:SadieDiane

In the information age, data will follow us from the time we first walk into kindergarten to well past retirement. As data is used to guide us in making all kinds of decisions, from what we consume to what health plan we follow, it’s also becoming a powerful tool in education.

As more schools and colleges use algorithms to determine a student’s path, the Amazon- and Netflix-style practice of data mining will soon be the norm in how schools and students operate.

But that might not be such a bad thing. Just as the two online behemoths — Amazon and Netflix — are able to use software to predict books, music, and movies you might like based on your past preferences, schools are using data to place students not only in their appropriate learning level, but even to recommend what subject to major in.

In K-12 education, it’s happening in classrooms and computer labs in both rich and blue-collar schools. In Covington Elementary, for example, the affluent Silicon Valley community where each fifth-grade student has a laptop and is learning math using Khan Academy videos and quizzes, teachers can track each student’s progress in real time on their iPads. When a student is stuck in one subject area, teachers can help the student one-on-one.

Likewise, at Rocketship’s Los Suenos Elementary school in a working class neighborhood in San Jose, teacher Alana Mednick can track her students’ progress based on how they score on their online computer games in their Learning Lab. And these examples are hardly rare these days.

On the college level, student data is being used for everything from recommending courses to picking majors. Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., rolled out a program last year that uses data based on students’ majors, class history, grades, and similar student performance to help students decide on courses. (Students also still get advice from guidance counselors.) And according to the university’s provost, students who took the software-recommended classes received a half-point higher GPA than those who didn’t.

This spring, Austin Peay will take the experiment on a larger scale and use the computer algorithm to recommend a major for students who are undecided and for those who might choose one that’s not “right” for them.

But even before students apply to college, a company called Parchment will help them figure out which schools they’ll have the best chance to get accepted to. Parchment uses vast amounts of users’ data — GPA, SAT scores, extracurricular activities and so on —  to assess whether former applicants with similar profiles gained admission into certain schools. Parchment also says it can help point students towards schools that match their profiles, helping them find schools that are a good fit.

Getting that granular level of information to help guide decisions can help students bypass mistakes — but what happens then to serendipity, to the path that follows curiosity and experimentation what educators called “passion-based learning” that’s the antithesis to the data-driven definition of achievement and success?

That’s exactly what data can actually be used for, says Mark Milliron, chancellor of Western Governor University Texas, a nonprofit online university, said at the Big Ideas Fest last month.

Capturing data has turned into an expensive and convoluted proposition, he said. Schools, whether they’re K-12 or higher ed, will collect data, then share that information with certain faculty but not others (the latter of whom are then upset they weren’t included), then bring in administrators who are uncomfortable with the data they’ve seen and want to “make sure it’s clean,” at which point they hire auditors, then compare the numbers to other institutions to see how they rate against them. The auditors will make recommendations, like buying more software, which requires hiring consultants, sending out requests for proposals, then implementing the software.

“So what happened to the kids?” Milliron said.

If Amazon’s high-powered data engines can take just one split second to process data about a person that will allow them to make a good decision, why can’t that same power be applied towards education? he asked.

“What we’ve seen in the consumer world and healthcare world that’s made such a huge impact is what happens when you get data to the front lines,” he said.

To that end, new initiatives are being launched in different colleges to help students. A program called Course Signals at Purdue warns students who are at risk of poor grades and “facilitates intervention and support” that can help improve student grades by an average of one letter, according to the school.

Flickr:Marc Smith

Here’s how it works: The program uses information already available about each student to determine whether he or she is “at risk of failing or withdrawing from a course as early as the second week of the semester or quarter.  Based on the data, the solution displays a red, yellow or green signal to students and faculty, indicating a students status in a course in real time. A red light indicates a high likelihood of failing; yellow indicates a potential problem of succeeding; and green signals a high likelihood of succeeding.” Students receive an email with the progress report, along with suggested resources and recommendations from faculty on what to do next.

At WGU Texas, where Milliron is chancellor, the non-traditional online learning institution uses the same conceit for students, allowing them to create what he calls their own “learning journeys.” Though the school is technically based in Texas, only 1,600 of its 25,000 students are located in the state. What also makes this school different from others is that it’s “competency-based advancement,” which means students don’t have to take classes in subjects they’re already proficient in and progress at exactly their own level.

“The average student at WGU finishes in about 30 months as opposed to 60 months. So, they can get through in about half the time because many of them already have significant experience in their field and they can test out on competencies,” Milliron said in a recent Texas Tribune article. “They’d have to sit through classes that they could be teaching, which is often the challenge with adult learners.”

Dave Dugdale

Schools have long dealt with data, tracking students’ personal information, grades, courses, attendance and the like. But for the most part, these records have been scattered across filing systems — electronic and otherwise. Although most states have implemented some sort of system by which to collect and monitor students’ data, these often remain disconnected. Many databases are not online, and when they are, data often isn’t transmissible because of different databases and file systems.

Efforts are underway to help standardize student data, and this week, two new developments occurred in this vein.

As EdWeek’s Sarah Sparks reports, the Common Education Data Standards Initiative released the first draft of the second stage of its core data definitions.

The initiative has been working on these standards for almost a year now, trying to devise standards so that a student’s school-related information can move with him. As it stands, even within districts, it’s been difficult to transfer students’ data throughout their academic career.  This new development makes it easier to track the data, whether it’s a matter of moving from grade school through high school or from high school to college, or moving from one school to another, in the same or different city or district.

It will be done by creating a common framework for the fields of information schools track. Some are obvious: name, address, city, zip. But they get increasingly complex: teacher base salary, student race/ethnicity, grade level (“junior” versus “grade 11″ for example), course name, Common Core Standard alignment, to name just a few examples.

“We’re very interested in expanding the common language for states to be able to talk to each other and do research together on how to improve student performance, program effectiveness and things like that,” says Gary West, the strategic initiatives director for information systems at the Council of Chief State School Officers in the EdWeek article. The group is one of the partners in the data initiative. West reports that, so far, 30 states have started to include these standardized definitions as part of their own student data systems.

And that’s actually what qualifies it as a “standard” — how widespread the adoption is. Even if one group or another proposes a standard, if it isn’t implemented widely, then it’s not as relevant. And interestingly, the same week that the Common Education Data Standards Initiative released its proposals, another group has thrown its version into the ring. It’s the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, which is proposing an Ed-Fi data standard. It too seeks to make the transfer of information between systems possible. What sets it apart from other standards, according to EdWeek is that it is the “only free large-scale data standard.”

Both of these initiatives are asking for public input and have comment periods that run through the end of next month. While the question of “what is standard” still remains unanswered, students and schools need better data portability and standardization so that what we do know about students, teachers, and schools isn’t trapped in one particular database or system and so that students can carry their data, much like their portfolio of work, throughout their academic careers and into their professional ones.