DLA Word of the Week: Academic Analytics

This one is closely related to my posting Wednesday about data mining and new products such as Starfish. Academic Analytics is an emerging field that allows us to take ginormous amounts existing data (presently sitting quietly and often unused on our IT servers), and make it incredibly useful to us in decision making. Decision making might include predicting which students are most likely to succeed, what next fall's enrollment is going to be, or in the case of online learning, which students presently need or will need (predictive) certain types of support. Educause Review had a pretty good introductory article on the topic last year. I've posted some fun weekly words on this blog, but this is one you need to remember. I'm thinking this is going to be the new super hot conference topic for 2009, particularly when we're thinking about retention and online education.