A few posts back, I described Oracle and Unicon’s Academic Enterprise Initiative and how it fits well with the vision of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). I also noted that it adds the concept of a “student data hub” (sometimes also called an “education data hub” in the document). I’m going to explore that concept a little bit in this post.
Now, within the edublogger community we tend to think in terms of small, independent pieces with data interoperability happening at the service layer (a la mashups). There are a number of reasons for this tendency, some of which are pragmatic, some philosophical, and some cultural. In contrast, Oracle being Oracle, they think a lot about enterprise applications and about data interoperability happening at the database layer. I don’t want to argue that one is better than the other. In fact, I believe that both are useful and may very well be necessary. But I do want to point out what Oracle’s angle on the subject adds to the world of possibilities within a learning environment.Let me start with the familiar. I have argued from time to time that students should have persistent ownership and control over their own course content (assignments, discussion posts, tests, etc.) as well as the metadata attached to it (replies from other students, comments from the teacher, etc.). Rather than being siloed in particular applications within particular course instances, the data should be pulled into those applications from a student’s unified”Box O’ Stuff” so that the student owns it and, by default, continues to have access to it long after the course has been closed and archived. Even this much centralization runs somewhat against the grain of the edublogger community, which tends to think about mashing up photos living in Flickr with maps living on Google, etc.
Oracle goes much further, suggesting a large, centralized data store. In part, this is to serve the administrative needs of the university and is not directly tied to day-to-day teaching and learning concerns. However, the white paper also raises several provocative use cases that hit closer to home:
- “Instructors, advisors and students could compare grades, assignment results, and class participation in classes that are within the student’s major with those that are not to assess the student’s academic career choice and performance.”
- “Instructors and staff could assess class performance based on variable academic characteristics such as major, cohort, waiver of pre-requisites, etc.”
- “Advisors could analyze grade, attendance, and class participation trends as an early warning system for students who are underperforming or at risk of academic failure or drop out. This data is also planned to include student online participation, class-based online presence management, and other student activities.”
There are some interesting common themes across these use cases. First, they focus on supporting the students at a higher level view than within a course. As with an ePortfolio/Box O’ Stuff, we want to look at the student’s achievements across a number of courses and see how she is doing. In this case, however, we’re looking at other assessment data and are able to slice and dice it in various ways. Second, we’re looking at it from the teacher or advisor’s perspective. A lot of the more interesting work in learning technologies today is focused on empowering the students. That’s terrific, but we should also be thinking about innovations that could help educational professionals be more effective in supporting the students.
Notice, too, that some of this capability is derived in Oracle’s use cases from being able to look across multiple students and spot trends. Are we really doing students a service by relaxing prerequisites, for example? Or are we setting them up for likely failure? The data can help us answer those questions if only we can access it in the right way. And finally, some of this data is not just stuff that can live in any old application. Grades, for example, should be drawn from a secure application with appropriate assurances that the information is accurate and up-to-date.
Hence, the Student Data Hub. In Oracle’s vision, applications are loosely coupled but data is (largely) centralized for validation and analysis purposes. It doesn’t preclude having distributed data sources (e.g., Flickr) as well, but derives some of its power from taking advantage of the sorts of things that enterprise relational databases and data warehouses do really well.
