Can Universities Use Data to Fix What Ails the Lecture? - Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed

Colleges that are largely online, like the University of Phoenix and Southern New Hampshire University’s College of Online and Continuing Education, sit atop vast deposits of data describing students’ interactions with instructors, peers, readings, and quizzes. Those data can be mined for insights about teaching techniques that are not working and concepts that students are failing to grasp. They also can be used to design software that adapts on the fly to the needs of individual students, an approach that many advocates see as online education’s trump card against traditional instruction. http://m.chronicle.com/article/Can-Universities-Use-Data-to/148307/