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DEMAND FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND NEEDS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
According to Peter Sondegaar, senior vice-president and global head of research at Gartner, "By 2015, 4.4 million information technology (IT) jobs will be created to support big data, generating 1.9 million IT jobs in the United States. In addition, every big datarelated role in the United States will create emplo}?ment for three people outside of IT, so over the next 4 years a total of 6 million jobs in the United States, will be generated by the information economy" (Gartner, 2012). According to MarketsandMarkets, the total market value in big data will grow by 25.5% by 2018. The same research firm also pointed out that business analytics market will grow at a compound yearly rate of 32.7% to 2019. McKinsey & Company projects that there will be "a shortfall of between 140,000 and 190,000 deep analytical big data professionals by 2018" (MarketsandMarkets, 2013).
With this increasing demand for business intelligence, educational institutions are beginning to also see the need for hiring business intelligence specialists to harvest data from educational systems and turn it into meaningful information. This information presented in a visual format allows for academic programs to provide evidence of student achievement throughout online programs. As for other modalities of instruction, there may be gaps in the data that hinder the ability to provide an accurate picture. For example, in a face-to-face classroom where transactions take place through paper and white boards, there will not be any data collected electronically. To help bridge this gap, many academic institutions are beginning to work around this by implementing multimodal templates for more traditional classroom environments.
MULTIMODAL TEMPLATES AND LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ANALYTICS
One of the ways in which higher education institutions can collect data for learning analytics is to use a learning management system in all courses, regardless of modality of instruction. Picciano (2014) pointed out many of the benefits and concerns of using learning analytics in blended environments, explaining there may be gaps where the learning system might have been used in different ways. The use of the learning management system needs to be consistent where the same types of activities can produce rubric statistics results and the learning outcomes can be tracked and reported...