As Big Data Comes to College, Officials Wrestle to Set New Ethical Norms
A week before classes begin at the University of Maryland University College, students can start poking around the online course materials. Some do, looking over the syllabus and getting a feel for the subject, but others don’t bother. It turns out that with just a little number crunching of that pre-course behavior, university officials can make some surprisingly accurate predictions about who will flourish and who will flounder. "We know the day before the course starts which students are highly unlikely to succeed," says Marie Cini, provost at UMUC, where most of the 60,000 undergraduates take courses online.