Big Data and Learning Analytics in Higher Education

This book focuses on the uses of big data in the context of higher education. The bookdescribesa wide range of administrative and operational data gatheringprocesses aimed at assessing institutional performance and progress in order to predict future performance, and identifies potential issues related to academic programming, research, teaching and learning.Big data refers to data which is fundamentally too bigandcomplex and moves too fast forthe processing capacity of conventional database systems. The value of big data is the ability to identify useful data and turn it into useable information by identifying patterns and deviations from patterns.