Pivotal facets of Data Visualization in the Education sector

When someone asks you where a particular state in a country is, I’m sure you visualize a map or a globe in your head. It is because you have seen one. But what if a map or a globe wasn’t ever put down in a visual form? 

What if someone just told you that Finland is to the north of Russia or Argentina is to the southwest of Brazil and so on about other countries, their states, and cities? Would you remember it as well as you remember them seeing on a globe? I doubt. 

This is because having a visual form of data is quite necessary. Studies referred by the T-Sciences show that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than they do text. 

When the brain processes visuals so much faster, it makes the information in the visual more retainable. The science and technology of analyzing data and displaying it in a graphical form is called data visualization. It is a stream of big data that is blended with creating images, communicating patterns, and relationships.

Data visualization is used in almost every industry in today’s day, because of its characteristic of converting raw tabular data and complex data representations into accurate, effective, and interactive representation of data. Data visualization solutions offer a variety of visualizations for the user’s data sets. But can all this be leveraged in the education sector? Yes, it can be. But why? Because according to a study, visual aids in classrooms can help in improving the learning process by up to 400%. It is a huge upwards growth ratio, that helps in providing students a direct experience instead of just texts. Let’s look into how data visualization can impact the education industry.

Detection of Problems

Data visualization is a stream of big data, and big data stores and manages huge data sets. The attendance record, test results records of different subjects, activity records, etc. are stored by institutions for every student. There is a ton of data that is just stored and not used to its potential. Data visualization can get this data and analyze it to derive conclusions out of it. Analysis reveals patterns that may have been out of sight and can be used as a shred of evidence for the establishment of a problem statement. A line graph revealed that Rose has been doing well in all her courses except for Math and Statistics. Taking into account several datasets from the data lake of student records, it was revealed that Rose has a difficulty understanding numbers. A Venn diagram and an interrelationship diagram of Rose’s records showed a pattern that Rose tends to remain absent at school or leaves early from school when these courses are there in the timetable. Visual data can help in pinpointing the problem and looking for the root cause behind it in order to take effective measures.

Dashboard for tracking regular performance

A student may be performing well and gradually dipping down in performance which teachers might not even notice. Or vice versa, a student might be improving, and his progress might go unnoticed. To ensure that doesn’t happen, data visualization can be used. Data visualization solutions provide users with the ability to upload data sets and get visual presentations from those. So, when the data is updated constantly, it becomes easier to track the performance. Which can be used to tailor-make the course to increase performance. It is imperative to know what way you are going, where do you currently stand and where have you come from and data visualization shows you a clear picture of the same.

Finding the most effective methodologies

Schools and teachers constantly try to use different methods of teaching, different ways of managing things in a class and introduce different modules to suit the students. But not each and every one of those work in the favour of the institution and its stakeholders. Data visualization analytics solutions give you a virtual picture of the methodologies that have helped in improving the performance of the institution and their students along with the programs that have not proven to be so beneficial. This helps in removing the non-performing programs and re-implementing the processes that have shown success. For example – Attention levels of students can be seen improving since the adoption of Display Panels instead of blackboards.

Better Insights into difficult topics

Sometimes, there are topics that are tougher to explain or understand even by educators. Data visualization provides deeper insights to adapt to the minds of students. Some topics are difficult to remember because of the complexity of nature. For example – many of us have difficulty remembering the dates and events in history, but an infographic showing what happened where and when in a pictorial format will help us retain that information much better than reading all the years and events altogether and getting confused.

Quick Decision Making

When you have a problem in sight and there are graphs and other visuals showing the predicted solutions and their potential impact, it becomes easier for us to take important decisions quickly. The management in schools and universities have many problems to tackle and critical decisions to make. Not just the management, but also the students. Students are given the choice between variable subjects and classes that they want to take in the next semester. It is an important decision as it will lay down the foundation of their career path. Data visualization can use past data records and produce predictive analytics showing the future course of action and alternatives.

Round up

Data visualization might look something generic, but it is in fact very impactful. It not only helps the students in understanding and remembering things better, but also helps the educators and institutions to prepare themselves in the best possible way that is more suitable and effective for the students as well as themselves. Data visualization can be used to enhance the education sector and make it more interactive.