I thought I share this interesting report by EDUCAUSE about analytics in Higher Education (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERS1207/ers1207.pdf) , especially since it has become the new “buzzword” in higher education. In reading the report, I became curious at how “analytics” was different from what analysts currently do with their work. I guess I was hoping for a more in-depth discussion on how business like Target, NetFlix, Amazon use data to better target the needs of their customers and how those types of analysis could benefit the IR-type folks in higher education.
Maybe what’s missing in these types of discussion is the use of statistics. For example, much of statistics is used to generalize to a population; however, I think the service industry like Target has moved to using statistics as a way to predict individual outcomes. Truthfully, this is all moot if we don’t share our data with each other, because for any of this to work (either generalizing to a population or predicting behavior), the more information the better. This does not mean that the first step is to go out and collect more data, but instead we utilize what is available already.