Big data technology-enabled analytical solution for quality assessment of higher education systems

Abstract

Educational Intelligence is a broad area of big data analytical applications that make use of big data technologies for implementation of solutions for education and research. This paper demonstrates the designing, development and deployment of an educational intelligence application for real-world scenarios. Firstly, a quality assessment framework for higher education systems that evaluate institutions on the basis of performance of outgoing students was proposed. Secondly, big data enabled technological setup was used for its implementation. Literature was surveyed to evaluate existing quality frameworks. Most existing quality assessment systems take into account the dimensions related to inputs, processes and outputs, but they tend to ignore the perspective that assesses the institution on the basis of outcome of the educational process. This paper demonstrates the use of outcome perspective to compute quality metrics and create visual analytics. In order to implement and test the framework, R programming language and a cloud based big data technology that is Google, BigQuery were used.