Innovation Science for Education Analytics (ISEA): A Data Science Training Program to Advance Educational Research and Practice

The use of education technologies is generating large quantities of data at unprecedented speed. These data (e.g., the prose in digital instructional materials, social media data, clickstreams from e-learning platforms) are largely unstructured or noisy, meaning that they are not arranged according to a preset data model and/or have many complicated attributes. The features of these data make it difficult to use conventional analytic tools and techniques. This training program will prepare education researchers to use advanced supervised and unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing methods in conjunction with human coding to facilitate extracting meaningful insights from education big data. The trainers will also address data ethics and professionalism throughout the training. The training is intended for a mixture of education researchers, school district data analysts, and education technology employees who have some background in statistics.