Educating Data

Chapter 1. Educating Data

The use of large-scale and new, emerging sources of data to make better decisions has taken hold in industry after industry over the past several years. Corporations have been the first to act on this potential in search, advertising, finance, surveillance, retail, manufacturing, and more. Data is beginning to make inroads in the non-profit sector as well—and will soon transform education. For example, GiveDirectly, an organization focused on managing unconditional cash transfer programs, and DataKind, an organization supporting data scientists who volunteer their time to social good projects, recently paired up to use data science to address poverty in the poorest rural areas in the world. They reduced the number of families that required face-to-face interviews by using satellite imagery, crowdsourced coding, and machine learning to develop a model that indicated villages most likely to be at the highest risk—based on the simple criterion of predominant type of roof in a village (villages with more metal than thatched roofs are at less risk). Education as an area of research and development is also moving in this direction. As Mark Milliron, Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer of Civitas Learning, explains, “We’ve been able to get people from healthcare analytics or from the social media space. We have people who come from the advertising world and from others. What’s been great is they’ve been so drawn to this mission. Use your powers for good, right?” ...