Exploring the use of big data analytics for improving support to students in higher education

In the past two decades, with the globalisation of education, there has been a continuous increase in the diversity of students in Higher Education. This diversity form a basis for a culturally rich environment, although, the cultural and language differences and the diversity in teaching and learning styles also bring challenges. From a university’s perspective, providing the maximum support to overcome these challenges and achieving maximised student engagement would be in its best interest. Recent advances in Big Data and increase in electronically available education data can help in achieving these aims. This paper reports the findings of a preliminary study which applies Big Data analysis methods to analyse education data gathered from learning management systems. The aims was to understand ways to improve student engagement and reduce student dropout. This paper documents the experience gained in this early exploration and preliminary analysis, and thereby provides background knowledge for reporting of data from the formal data collection stage which will be conducted at a later stage of research.