Tu Zipei: Big data helps education to be more refined, personalized and intelligent

Xinhuanet, Beijing, August 26th China's first Campus CIO Education Summit was held in Beijing today. In June 2016, the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan for Education Informatization" issued by the Ministry of Education clearly stated that it is necessary to gradually establish a system in which school leaders serve as the chief information officer (CIO) at all levels and types of schools, and comprehensively coordinate the information of the unit. planning and development. "China's First Campus CIO Education Summit" came into being under such a background.

At the conference site, Tu Zipei, a big data expert and former vice president of Alibaba, shared with the guests the changes he saw brought about by big data as a guest speaker:

First, big data makes education more refined. Let’s look at some examples. This is from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Through data analysis, they found out which students always go to the cafeteria alone, which students always go to the library alone, and which students never participate in any club activities. These students It is a relatively lonely student. Follow them and you can solve some problems. In the second example, a girl from East China Normal University suddenly received a text message saying: Classmate, do you have financial problems in your family and life difficulties? The girl said she felt very warm, why? Because she saw that the school's consumption records showed that she ate very little lunch. This girl later said that I was losing weight. This is a beautiful mistake, but it also reflects the usefulness of data from one aspect.

The University of Kentucky uses data to find students who have problems after integrating various behavioral data of students. Here's what's happening in New York. The New York Times asked the New York Department of Education to open up the teaching, examination, and all grade data of local K12 elementary school teachers. What is the reason? The reason is that this is data belonging to the public sector. These data are invested and constructed with taxpayers' money. What is the use of opening up these data? That is to say, the results of each test of each student taught by each teacher are released, and after the release, a teacher can be evaluated. In this way, people not only have a more refined understanding of the students, but also a more refined understanding of the teachers.

What is data? We are all talking about big data. Big data is traditional small data, derived from measurements, plus today's big records. Record all your actions, click is a record, photos, PPT, audio, etc. are all records, the reason why the data explodes is that the records of the data are exploding.

Second, big data makes education more personalized. There are many examples of personalization. Alibaba’s mobile phone Taobao, everyone sees a different interface when they open it. Alibaba has 350 million users, and everyone sees a different interface. What is behind it is the data, which is completed immediately within milliseconds. I will provide you with a personalized interface. There are thousands of products in the world. I will let you see the products you are most interested in and most likely to buy.

The same is true in our education field, why? We can record the data, every time a learner clicks with the mouse, the length of stay, the number of questions asked, the number of participants in the discussion, all activity trajectories can be recorded, different people have different trajectories, we aim at these different Locus offers individual solutions.

I think we're going to have a new discipline called learning behavior analytics. The essence is that more and more learning behaviors are recorded and become data, which can then be analyzed empirically. We can imagine the difference between tradition and modern times. After a class, an exam is held. After the exam, the teacher takes the papers and goes home for correction and analysis, and then knows which teaching point and which knowledge point the students have mastered. How about it. But today, it's electronic. As soon as the lecture is over, I will take the exam immediately, and I will complete it on my mobile phone and iPad. After the exam, the results will be analyzed immediately. You can see which student has mastered which knowledge point, and the data analysis can tell you. So to promote the development of this subject, I think it is the next important thing in the field of education.

Third, big data makes education more intelligent. Everyone knows about AlphaGo, but you may not know that the Japanese robot "Higashi Robo-kun", developed by the Japanese Intelligence Research Institute, has been participating in the Japanese National University Entrance Examination for three or four consecutive years, which is equivalent to the Japanese college entrance examination. In the first two years, I couldn't pass the exam, but this year I passed the exam, with 551 points, and the admission score is 510 points. This robot is not only good at mathematics and science, but also good at liberal arts, and has a high score in the history test. China is also developing college entrance examination robots, and HKUST Xunfei hopes that their products will be able to take the college entrance examination next year. So intelligence is another huge wave for us.

I would also like to share with you a specific course. What is the level of development of our online and intelligent education platform today? This is a real course: the EDS platform of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Electronic circuits, this course has 155,000 people registered around the world, and 18,000 people have completed the entire course. 7,000 people have been certified. Students come from 194 countries, the United States is the most, India is second, then the United Kingdom, and China has more than 600 students. 97% of students are native speakers of English and 16% are Spanish. 27% are high school students, 37% have a bachelor's degree, and 28% have a master's degree. What this represents, the possibility of lifelong learning, has come to us.

According to a latest research report on the EDS platform of Harvard University, from 2012 to 2014, there were 1.7 million participants, 10 million study hours, and the average age was 28 years old. times. Certification is mentioned in this report. What effect does certification have on online education platforms? Most of today's online education platforms are free, including what we call Harvard University, MIT, etc., and the only difference between you and college students after you sign up is that they sit in the classroom and you don't. Remote, exams and assignments are the same, free, why do universities do this?

Let's do a small calculation, many people want to be certified, I call this certification definition "micro degree". There are only 12 courses in a master's course. When you have obtained all 12 courses, it is equivalent to getting a micro degree. If you get a micro degree from Harvard University, and you get a formal degree from Hebei University of Science and Technology, who will the final employer hire? This is a deadly question. Today we have to think about online education and answer this question. Let's look at it again. If the certification of a course is 100 yuan, and the master's degree is 12 courses, it means 1200 yuan. It is also said that you can get a course at Harvard University for 1200 yuan today. Master's degree, what about Harvard? Hundreds of thousands of people, or even millions of people are listening to a course. If a certification fee of 100 yuan is charged for a course, 100,000 people are certified for a course, and 100 courses are offered in a semester. How much he earns in the semester, one billion US dollars, this is the online education market.

In my opinion, there are three models of online education today. The first is that the company not only provides the platform, but also courses; the second is the cooperation between the company and the university, the company provides the technology platform, and the university provides the courses; the third is that the university does it by itself, and the university provides both the technology platform and the engineering. But they have one thing in common, the courses are all free, and then provide arguments.

MOOC is a subversion to the entire field of education. Looking back at our education field today, it was the earliest private school era, where one day a teacher was a lifelong teacher, word of mouth passed on. After the Industrial Revolution, benefiting from the development of printing technology, schools began to enroll students on a large scale. Entering the era of scale cultivation, what about today? Today we are going back again. We can use information technology to quickly build an educational scenario. In this educational scenario, big data is used to provide intelligent and personalized educational solutions.