Developing Big Data Projects in Open University Engineering Courses: Lessons Learned

Abstract

Big Data courses in which students are asked to carry out Big Data projects are becoming more frequent as a part of University Engineering curriculum. In these courses, instructors and students must face a series of special characteristics, difficulties and challenges that it is important to know about beforehand, so the lecturer can better plan the subject and manage the teaching methods in order to prevent students' academic dropout and low performance. The goal of this research is to approach this problem by sharing the lessons learned in the process of teaching e-learning courses where students are required to develop a Big Data project as a part of a final degree/master course. In order to do so, a survey was carried out among a group of students enrolled in those kinds of courses during the last years. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the obtained data led us to present a series of lessons learned that may help other participants (both students and lecturers) to better study, design and teach similar courses. In addition, the results shed light on possible existing open problems in the area of Big Data project development. Both the methodology used and the survey designed in this research were validated by a group of experts in the area using a formal statistical approach at a significance level of p<0.008, which support the validity of the lessons learned.

Using the problem based learning method and educational technologies to teach open data: A design-based research approach

“…The literature shows that OD education is still in its infancy, thus, there is need to raise awareness of OD (Gascó-Hernández et al, 2018 ) and overcome risks and challenges, such as low data quality (Lara et al, 2020 ; Selwyn et al, 2017 ). Designing effective learning environments and appropriate resources is one of the priorities in the area, with scholars suggesting choosing adaptable formats, technologies and pedagogies (Coughlan, 2019 ; Mikroyannidis et al, 2016 ).…”

“…In terms of pedagogy, instructors appear to prefer inquiry-based approaches (Coughlan, 2019 ; Lara et al, 2020 ). This seems to be appropriate considering that there is evidence that students’ learning is improved when they are involved in hands-on activities (Wolff et al, 2019 ) and become familiar with the context in which the data were created and the way real organisations operate (Gascó-Hernández et al, 2018 ; Mikroyannidis et al, 2016 ).…”

“…In addition, the role of technology in facilitating the development of OD skills is unclear. Lara et al ( 2020 ) listed at least 10 different technologies used in Big Data student projects, which may be useful for engineering education, but not necessarily suitable for OD education or students from other disciplines. Besides, data analysis tools are not the only technologies used by students as part of their learning experience.…”

A Patent Analysis on Big Data Projects

“…Additionally, a project management and execution support platform with an emphasis on analytics and reporting was reported to facilitate successful project decision-making (Pondel & Pondel, 2016). It is also evident that there is a need for greater criticality for the data storage and analysis steps, especially concerning the high risk of collecting low-quality data and the steep learning curve of the initial phase of Big Data projects (Lara et al, 2020).…”

Application of Informational Big Data in Case Study and Collection of Basic Educational Psychology

“…With the rapid development of information technology, arti cial intelligence and big data are in uencing various industries [1][2][3]. Nowadays, digitalization and informatization in colleges and universities have been promoted and improved, which has increased the amount of data in research results, students' daily behavior, academic performance, and network usage [4].…”