Data Science in Education: Applications and Challenges

In today’s technology environment, big data is a catchphrase that everyone is talking about. Most traditional pedagogies offer students limited timely feedback, require lecturers and teachers to spend hours grading routine assignments. These pedagogies fail in integrating ample digital resources and are not potent to enhance students’ understanding. Data has enormous potential to enhance research, decision making, and lifelong learning. The combination of complex disciplines of computer science and statistics with social science philosophy in education data science aims to study more about how students learn and interact in the educational environment with real-time data collection. Despite its infancy, the wide availability of educational data has spurred an interest in analyzing relevant knowledge to guide educational policy and practice. This paper discusses the applications of data science in education field as well as the challenges for future development.