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With the advent of the internet and communication technology, the penetration of e-learning has increased. The digital data being created by the educational and research institutions is also on the ascent. The growing interest in recent years toward big data, educational data mining and learning analytics has motivated the development of new analytical ways and approaches and advancements in learning settings. The need for using big data to handle, analyze this large amount of data is prime. This trend has started attracting the interest of educational institutions which have an important role in the development skills process and the preparation of a new generation of learners. “A real revolution for education,” it is based on this kind of terms that many articles have paid attention to big data for learning. How can analytics techniques and tools be so efficient and become a great prospect for the learning process? Big data analytics, when applied into teaching and learning processes, might help to improvise as well as to develop new paradigms. In this perspective, this paper aims to investigate the most promising applications and issues of big data for the design of the next-generation of massive e-learning. Specifically, it addresses the analytical tools and approaches for enhancing the future of e-learning, pitfalls arising from the usage of large data sets. Globally, this paper focuses on the possible application of big data techniques on learning developments, to show the power of analytics and why integrating big data is so important for the learning context.

Big data has in the recent years been an area of interest among innovative sectors and has become a major priority for many industries, and learning sector cannot escape to this deluge. This paper focuses on the different methods of big data able to be used in learning context to understand the benefits it can bring both to teaching and learning process, and identify its possible impact on the future of this sector in general. This paper investigates the connection between big data and the learning context. This connection can be illustrated by identifying the several main analytics approaches, methods and tools for improving the learning process. This can be clearer by the examination of the different ways and solutions that contribute to making a learning process more agile and dynamic. The methods that were used in this research are mainly of a descriptive and analytical nature, to establish how big data and analytics methods develop the learning process, and understand their contributions and impacts in addressing learning issues. To this end, authors have collected and reviewed existing literature related to big data in education and the technology application in the learning context. Authors then have done the same process with dynamic and operational examples of big data for learning. In this context, the authors noticed that there are jigsaw bits that contained important knowledge on the different parts of the research area. The process concludes by outlining the role and benefit of the related actors and highlighting the several directions relating to the development and implementation of an efficient learning process based on big data analytics.

Big data analytics, its techniques, tools and algorithms are important to improve the learning context. The findings in this paper suggest that the incorporation of an approach based on big data is of crucial importance. This approach can improve the learning process, for this, its implementation must be correctly aligned with educational strategies and learning needs.

This research represents a reference to better understanding the influence and the role of big data in educational dynamic. In addition, it leads to improve existing literature about big data for learning. The limitations of the paper are given by its nature derived from a theoretical perspective, and the discussed ideas can be empirically validated by identifying how big data helps in addressing learning issues.

Over the time, the process that leads to the acquisition of the knowledge uses and receives more technological tools and components; this approach has contributed to the development of information communication and the interactive learning context. Technology applications continue to expand the boundaries of education into an “anytime/anywhere” experience. This technology and its wide use in the learning system produce a vast amount of different kinds of data. These data are still rarely exploited by educational practitioners. Its successful exploitation conducts educational actors to achieve their full potential in a complex and uncertain environment. The general motivation for this research is assisting higher educational institutions to better understand the impact of the big data as a success factor to develop their learning process and achieve their educational strategy and goals. This study contributes to better understand how big data analytics solutions are turned into operational actions and will be particularly valuable to improve learning in educational institutions.

Drawing on assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2006), this conceptual chapter seeks to provide an analytical lens for examining the power and capacity of Big Data analytics to exercise territorializing and deterritorializing effects on compound polities and supranational organizations. More specifically, the modern massive agglomeration of data streams and the accelerated computational power available to sort and channel them in effecting actions, decisions, and reconfigurations in contemporary assemblages, necessitate new exploratory tools to examine the impact of such trends on educational phenomena from a comparative perspective. In the first part, the chapter builds an analytical instrumentarium useful in theoretically elucidating the effects of Big Data on complex assemblages and serves as a methodological extension in investigating the ramifications of these effects on educational systems, spaces, and policyscapes. The second part sets out to illustrate how assemblage theory can explain the tension between the formal use of large official statistical data sets as a type of “regulated” Big Data, and the informal use of social media, as a type of “unregulated” Big Data, to construct or deconstruct, respectively, interlacing/interlocking components of assemblages, such as supranational organizations or compound polities. The European Union (EU) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are taken as examples of complex assemblages in which the long-standing utilization of EU’s Eurostat and CARICOM’s Regional Statistical Database have served as territorializing forces in consolidating policy logics and in legitimizing decision-making at the supranational level, while the emergence of “loose” social networking technologies appears to have deterritorializing effects when employed deliberately to delegitimize or subvert socio-political processes across supranational polities.

Educational intelligence can be considered a prized asset in political actors’ careful calculations in setting policy agendas for radical educational transformations in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution characterized by Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT). As an agent of globalization, the European Union (EU) is uniquely positioned to steer the direction of this new wave of digital technologies for two cardinal objectives in the EU’s rhetorical discourse: social cohesion and economic prosperity. Conversely, its complex governance architecture, which restricts its role in educational policy, tempers its ability to drive policy reforms in education for the strategic and coordinated deployment of Big Data in educational systems to support those twin objectives. This chapter examines this burgeoning policy arena in the European Union by interrogating the most recent policies on the “data economy” enacted at the EU-level and the positionality of education in this newest wave of policy formulation. A content and discourse analysis of policy documents on Big Data reveals that the EU is launching multiple initiatives to regulate these novel technologies across its socio-economic sectors. However, the amorphous nature and unpredictable impact of these technologies, along with the jurisdictional barriers in the education sector stemming from the delimitation of governance layers in the EU, pose difficulties in generating a coordinated approach to policy implementation to engender tangible results. Hence, the contours of an educational intelligent economy in the EU needs considerable policy attention and technical resources in its transition from the current ideational stage to its concrete manifestation.

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution and the intelligent economy, this conceptual chapter explores the evolution of educational governance from one based on governing by numbers and evidence-based governance to one constituted around governance by data or data-based educational governance. With the rise of markets and networks in education, Big Data, machine data, high-dimension data, open data, and dark data have consequences for the governance of national educational systems. In doing so, it draws attention to the rise of the algorithmization and computerization of educational policy-making. The author uses the concept of “blitzscaling”, aided by the conceptual framing of assemblage theory, to suggest that we are witnessing the rise of a fragmented model of educational governance. I call this governance with a “big G” and governance with a “small g.” In short, I suggest that while globalization has led to the deterritorializing of the national state, data educational governance, an assemblage, is bringing about the reterritorialization of things as new material projects are being reconstituted.

The implications and impacts of the educational intelligent economy from the vantage point of digital frontierism is explored using a decolonial framework, with a specific focus on Big Data and data sharing in Comparative and International Education (CIE). Recent debates are reviewed about CIE’s past histories and its current directions to tease out their implications for data sharing. The authors demonstrate how data sharing continues to reinforce imperialism through control, dissemination, and application of data, and how electronic and digital colonialism preserve current intellectual and structural hegemonies. Then, we give an example of how donors and funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation, engage in neoliberal scientism and control of data, and how it affects the future of social sciences, including CIE. Our inquiry is at the intersections of economic intelligence and educational intelligence in a rapidly evolving technocentric, data-dominated, and networked economy. The authors demonstrate how educational intelligence in the global economy may exacerbate the asymmetric access to data between the global North and the South, as educational data are increasingly becoming global commodities to be traded between various public and private actors. Finally, the authors argue that decolonial participatory research designs that aim at positive, sustained transformations, as opposed to the stagnancy of Big Data and data mining, should be used to address the problems inherent to the Educational Intelligent Economy.

Over the past few years, assemblage theory or assemblage thinking has garnered increasing attention in educational research, but has been used only tangentially in explications of the nature of comparative and international education (CIE) as a field. This conceptual examination applies an assemblage theory lens to explore the contours of CIE as a scholarly field marked by its rich and interweaved architecture. It does so by first reviewing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) principles of rhizomatic structures to define the emergence of assemblages. Secondly, it transposes these principles in conceiving the field of CIE as a meta-assemblage of associated and subordinated sub-assemblages of actors driven by varied disciplinary, interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary interests. Finally, it interrogates the role of Big Data technologies in exerting (re)territorializing and deterritorializing tendencies on the (re)configuration of CIE. The chapter concludes with reiterating the variable character of CIE as a meta-assemblage and proposes ways to move this conversation forward.

This paper discusses how educational policies have shaped the development of large-scale educational data and reviews current practices on the educational data use in selected states. Our purposes are to: (1) analyze the common practice and use of educational data in postsecondary education institutions and identify challenges as the educational crossroads; (2) propose the concept of Data Literacy (DL) for teaching (Mandinach & Gummer, 2013a) and its relevance to researchers and stakeholders in postsecondary education; and (3) provide future implications for practices and research to increase educational DL among administrators, practitioners, and faculty in postsecondary education.

We used two guiding conceptual frameworks to analyze the common practice and use of educational data in postsecondary education institutions and identify challenges as the educational crossroads. First, we used the 4Vs of Big Data by Rajan (2012) to examine the misalignment between the policy mandate and the practices. The elements of the 4Vs of Big Data – volume, velocity, variety, and veracity – help us to depict how Big Data enables educators to organize, store, manage, and manipulate vast amounts of educational data at the right moment and at the right time. Second, we used the conceptual framework for DL proposed by Gummer and Mandinach (in press). They interpret DL “as the collection, examination, analysis, and interpretation of data to inform some sort of decision in an educational setting” (p. 1, in press).

Using the guiding frameworks, we identified four educational data crossroads as follows:

Crossroad 1: Unintended Increase in Workload Volume;

Crossroad 2: Unrealistic Expectations of Data Velocity;

Crossroad 3: Data Variety in Silos; and

Crossroad 4: Data Veracity and Policy Agenda Mismatch.

In this paper, we explain each of these crossroads in more detail with some examples.

Much of the existing body of literature, exemplary practices, as well as federal and state funding has been focused on K-12 education contexts. In this paper, we identify current practices and challenges of educational data in the institutions of higher education. Additionally, this paper presents the application of the exemplary practices of data literacy development in postsecondary education and implications for future practices of data literacy development in postsecondary education.

Almost every detail of our lives – where we go, what we do, and with whom – is captured as digital data. Technological advancements in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and data analytics offer the education sector new ways not only to improve policy and processes but also to personalize learning and teaching practice. However, these changes raise fundamental questions around who owns the data, how it might be used, and the consequences of use. The application of Big Data in education can be directed toward a wide range of stakeholders, such as educators, students, policy-makers, institutions, or researchers. It may also have different objectives, such as monitoring, student support, prediction, assessment, feedback, and personalization. This chapter presents the nuances and recent research trends spurred by technological advancements that have influenced the education sector and highlights the need to look beyond the technical boundaries using a socio-semiotic lens. With the explosion of available information and digital technologies pervading cultural, social, political as well as economic spaces, being a lifelong learner is pivotal for success. However, technology on its own is not sufficient to drive this change. For technology to be successful, it should complement individual learning cultures and education systems. This chapter is broadly divided into two main sections. In the first section, we contemplate a vision for the future, which is deemed possible based on ongoing digital and computing advancements. The second section elaborates the technological, pedagogical, cultural, and political requirements to attain that vision.