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Table 3 A list of current roles of stakeholders in the educational process

From: Big and open linked data analytics: a study on changing roles and skills in the higher educational process

Current roles

Objectives for using BOLED analytics

Learners (students)

It should help them in personalizing and customizing their learning efforts through a recommendation of relevant activities, resources and learning tasks, either individually or in comparison to other students. Learners should be able to analyse their progress quickly, easily find new information and data sources, link them, suggest new learning paths, etc.

Educators (teachers and tutors)

It should help them to analyse learners’ learning and behaviour including patterns, to predict learners’ performance and classify them into groups, to publish data through various channels and enable learners to participate and create own learning content, to improve the adaptation and customization of courses and materials, etc.

Educational researchers

It should help them in exploring large amounts of data, constructing analytical models, comparing the efficiency of various techniques and recommending the most useful one for each task, developing specific data analytics tools for educational purposes, etc.

Course developers

It should help them to implement new platforms, tools, and services into courses as well as develop data-related features, enabled by robust data infrastructures. This also enables to evaluate the structure of course content and its effectiveness in the learning process. Course developers can also profit from the availability of data sources and findings of educational researchers.

Administrators (network, system, data)

It should help them to effectively organize and utilize available resources, to improve network and system efficiency and provide better services to users, to profit from benefits of new platforms, tools, and services, etc.

Educational institutions (secondary schools, universities)

It should help them in making decision enabled by greater availability of relevant information gained from analytics activities at a broader level. Linking big data from diverse sources enables to examine the structure and performance of a curriculum as a whole and focus more on learners and their needs in the educational process.

Education policy makers

It should provide them new insights into the educational process and examine if the learning outputs meet the needs of current educational developments. They should be able to implement them by defining the principles and government policies in the educational sphere regarding the needs of a data-driven education.