Author: tf265

Why do we have to teach data analytics in schools?

Employers’ needs for data analytics are growing rapidly, in particular big data. The UK government stated in the policy paper UK Digital Strategy as follows:

Developments such as the rising use of social media and the increasing adoption of new technologies like the Internet of Things mean more data is being produced than ever before. At the same time, lower costs of collection, storage and processing – coupled with rising computing power – are making this data a rich raw material. This is creating new opportunities for business growth across all industry sectors, changing how we innovate, market, sell and consume services.

Financial Times has already pointed out in 2014 that “Britain is expected to create an average of 56,000 big data jobs a year until 2020”. It also states that “The big data industry has thrived as sectors as diverse as weather forecasting and fraud investigation have realised the business benefits of using consumer data to predict future trends.” Similarly, in their summary report in 2014, a company Statistical Analysis System (SAS) reported that “With demand for big data specialists forecast to increase by 160 per cent between 2013 and 2020, adding 346,000 big data jobs, hiring and keeping skilled big data refiners could become a costly exercise.” (2014, p. 5)

It is also reported that employers are having difficulties to find potential employees who would be soundly equipped by data analytics skills. For example, the SAS reported skills related to managerial, acumen, sector knowledge/understanding, presentation and interpersonal are particularly difficult to fill (ibid. p. 30).

 

In our project, we will explore innovative teaching approaches to develop students’ skills and understanding related to Data analytics!

 

Reference

DfDCM&S. (2017) Policy Paper UK Digital Strategy. (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-digital-strategy, accessed on 30/01/2018) 

SAS. (2014). Big Data Analytics Assessment of Demand for Labour and Skills 2013–2020, SAS UK & Ireland. 

Warrell, H. (2014) Demand for big data and skills shortages drives wages boom. Financial Times. (https://www.ft.com/content/953ff95a-6045-11e4-88d1-00144feabdc0, accessed on 30/01/2018) 

What is Data Analytics in schools? A definition by Piccano (2012) provides us with a perspective in analytics, which is defined as follows:

“The generic definition of analytics is similar to data-driven decision making. Essentially it is the science of examining data to draw conclusions and, when used in decision making, to present paths or courses of action. In recent years, the definition of analytics has gone further, however, to incorporate elements of operations research such as decision trees and strategy maps to establish predictive models and to determine probabilities for certain courses of action.” (p. 12)

We can also find many definitions of data analytics from internet sources.  For example:

“Data analytics (DA) is the process of examining data sets in order to draw conclusions about the information they contain, increasingly with the aid of specialized systems and software. Data analytics technologies and techniques are widely used in commercial industries to enable organizations to make more-informed business decisions and by scientists and researchers to verify or disprove scientific models, theories and hypotheses.” http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/definition/data-analytics

 

In order to visualise what key ideas are used in the definition of data analytics, we created a wordcloud from 9 Internet sources as follows:

As we can see, the word ‘business’ is the most frequently used in these definitions and descriptions of data analytics, and other words ‘information’, ‘process’, ‘statistical’, ‘predictive’ etc. follow. This echoes Piccano’s definitions of analytics above.

We also see the word ‘big’ in the above cloud, but data do not have to be big, although it is also stated, for example, that “data analytics is a general term for any type of processing that looks at historical data over time, but as the size of organizational data grows, the term data analytics is evolving to favor big data-capable systems” (https://www.informatica.com/services-and-training/glossary-of-terms/data-analytics-definition.html#fbid=XLAlnTWWkWy).

In summary, we would like to define data analytics as a process of ‘exploring data including big data to understand our world better, to draw conclusions, to make decisions and predictions, and to critically evaluate present/future paths or courses of action‘.

Reference

Picciano, A. G. (2012). The evolution of big data and learning analytics in American higher education. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 16(3), 9-20)