Is Education Prepared to Work in Data-Intensive Environments?

In the data-intensive environment, many concerns come to the fore regarding privacy and data protection, such as how many people have access to students' personal information, whether their data is secured or not, and how students can preserve their right to privacy, and more.

FREMONT, CA: Education is becoming more data-driven with the advent of personalized and adaptive learning, chatbots, automatic translators, or predictive learning. Many countries are striving to expand the role of technologies in education, which ultimately leads to more data-intensive educational systems. With the increasing interest in adaptive intelligent tutoring systems providing natural language interaction, tools for predicting school dropout, or the latest automated systems to boost student recruitment, the utilization of data-intensive technologies in the field of education will likely increase in the years to come.

Though digital innovations can bring new benefits and open doors to new possibilities, it is also important to understand that they can change the current landscape of education in unexpected directions. The reduction in unauthorized access to or disclosure of personal information has attracted media attention recently, but lack of automated bias, transparency, or the use of data to influence user behavior, are also crucial challenges that need to be taken care of when exploring these trends.

The evolving landscape of education will require both students and teachers to become more data literate. Also, education organizations and administrators will need to develop a comprehensive and proactive strategy when planning to implement and increase interaction with data-intensive education systems.

Let us look at some challenges of data-intensive systems in education:

Privacy and Data Protection

In the data-intensive environment, many concerns come to the fore regarding privacy and data protection, such as how many people have access to student's personal information, whether their data is secured or not, how students can preserve their right to privacy, and more.

Ethical Use of Data

Although automating tasks is a great way to save time and cost, it is important to find out the underlying risks in using automated systems. The education sector needs to figure out how to embrace technological solutions for education without ignoring ethical implications and in what circumstances and processes it would be appropriate to use the data-intensive systems (AI).

Responsibility

Another challenge is to prepare students and educators to protect themselves from unintended uses of technology.

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