There are many reasons as to why I am passionate about data analytics.
But one of the reasons that have kept my interest going is as explained by Bill Gates in his recent post – Here’s one great way to use your tech skills. While I’m not the coder like the William guy he mentioned, I certainly know the endless possibilities that data analytics could do to solve social problems. And if there’s one problem that I could apply to solve, it is the education.
Imagine if we are able to collect the data about students’ activities and behaviour in schools which includes the time they get into school, the number of times they are on MC, miss class, their grades, their responsiveness in class, their areas of interest, we can identify trends and root causes of why some students perform (or not) and understand the drivers behind it to help us come up with a more customized solution to help the students excel.
Of course it’s easier said than done. Coming up with the analysis is the easy part. The difficult part is to get good data. We need to encourage the teachers to start collecting the data from the students, they probably have but only pockets of it and not in structured manner. If you are interested with this problem, do let me know!
Dayana Omar 