Questions are surfacing as to whether the big-data analytics in MOOC platforms like EdX are offering any useful research results at all. In a short article in Science Magazine (.docx version here) Justin Reich argues "big datasets do not, by virtue of their size, inherently possess answers to interesting questions." In particular, "we have terabytes of data about what students clicked and very little understanding of what changed in their heads" and "it does not require trillions of event logs to demonstrate that effort is correlated with achievement." Phil Hill quotes substantial sections of the article in this post.
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