Seems to be the week for good articles from Forbes.
Today's story,"This Guy Left Google To Put The Power Of Big Data Into Small Classrooms", actually covers the much more important subject of personalized learning. Personalized learning uses data from a child's computer usage to determine how a child learns best--videos, books, lectures, projects, etc.--based on their test results and then uses this analysis to provide more course material in the preferred format to the child in all subjects. At a more "advanced" stage personalized learning determines the preferred formats of the best students and provides this format by subject to all students.
The Forbes article discusses the new non-profit venture of Prasad Ram, a former senior Google executive who founded Gooru. The goal of Gooru is to:
"to find the best online learning resources, to collect metadata and analyze your learning habits in order to use predictive technology to suggest the best resource for the future" [learning]
The Forbes writer incorrectly states that this approach is the only example of applying computer technology to personalized learning. There are several examples although some of the projects are not publicly disclosed. Where Gooru is interesting in their approach is that they let the classroom teacher filter the proposed content to presumably better match the student (than the results of the analytics). The approach has the benefit of garnering support from teachers, teacher unions and government. This approach is less threatening than a more student centric approach where the analytics alone determine the student content. Hopefully Gooru will do some evaluation early on to determine if the students do better with or without the teacher filtering. Such an evaluation might also be valuable to fine tune the predictive analytics.
Anyone interested in the future of education, learning and computer applications in these areas should be following "personalized learning". The Forbes story was sent to me by @john_menezes.