 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering HP Big Data Conference 2015, brought to you by HP Software. Now, your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Boston, Massachusetts for HP Big Data Conference. Special presentation of theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the simple noise. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. I'm here with my co-host Dave Vellante with wikibon.org, our next guest, Mike Day, Director of Information Systems, Nottingham Trent University. That's in the UK for you folks watching. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So welcome to theCUBE. We saw you yesterday at lunch, we're chatting. A lot of stuff going on in the universities with technology. Share with us what's happening with you. Oh, absolutely. Well, a little bit about Nottingham Trent University. We've got nearly 30,000 students and a high proportion of those students are first in their family to go to university. And we're trying to find a way to make sure that we can make all of our students but that population in particular as successful as possible. And we're using Big Data Analytics to do that. You know, one of the things we were chatting briefly about lunch yesterday, but we were kind of also talking yesterday in theCUBE is making Big Data a competitive advantage for business, but university competitive advantage is graduating smart people. That's the outcome that you're going for, right? And hire great teachers to teach those smart people. Get that flywheel going. That's right, that's right. And not lose money, so it stays around, right? Get more endowment. So how are you using Big Data? Because now there's new technology with RFID, Internet of Things, share with us what's the Big Data Analytics acquisition of data. Well, we've got a huge variety of data sources around the university. And we were really interested to understand how we might be able to understand how our students engage in their studies by looking at the digital footprint that they leave as they move around the university or they take books out of the library or they... Digital footprint, you mean everything? Everything, so they use smart cards to access labs or to access the printers and things. Whatever they do that, they're leaving a digital signature behind. And we were really interested to know whether we could use that digital signature to understand how our students are engaging in their studies, because one of the problems we have with those students who are first in their family to university is that sometimes they really doubt whether they should be there. Money's being wasted, oh my God, should I be here? Am I smart enough? All those good questions. All those things, and because of that, they can be perhaps as confident as they could be. And it means if they're struggling a bit, they're not the kinds of people are going to go and ask for help straight away because they think it's their fault. So we really needed a way to use that data about how people are engaging, to understand whether they were disengaging actually. And if we could do that and we could do that early enough, we could intervene. So your goal is to bring all the best of predictive recommendation engines to the lifestyle and academic. Oh, absolutely. So we can start to see that what sort of students' behaviors lead to success in university? And then we can start to say, well, actually, are the students who aren't engaging in the same way? And so one of the things we've done is to give a very simple graphical visualization to the students themselves so they can see how they compare to their peers in the same cohort. So you referenced you before, trying to get ahead of the curve with the kids who won't fall behind. Intuitively, it makes sense that if a young student gets behind, there wouldn't be a big trouble. But do you have data that sort of demonstrates that and have you been able to make an effect? Yeah, so what we've been able to do is, we can see now in the data we provide in the dashboard which we give to our academic tutors and to the students themselves. We can see when students start to disengage. And we can see that about two months earlier than a tutor on their own, perhaps could identify typically. Which means that that tutor is alerted, but there's a potential problem with an individual student. And therefore they can go and have a one-to-one conversation to find out what the problem is. Which very often is a personal problem of some kind or many and varied kinds of problems. The kinds of things that the data can't quite tell you yet about the answer is to. But nevertheless, we can see there's a potential problem that we can address. Well the data opens up new things. We're just talking about the Genome Project and really what you're looking at is that it's a signaling opportunity to see what the major trends are. For instance, we were talking about the Salkon at Khan Academy gave a presentation about how in the data of online courses, the pattern is when people struggle, they stay in the same spot which looks like they're in trouble. But yet when they break through, they then go on an accelerated learning ramp that beats the trajectory of the people who were going along there. So these kinds of new things change the paradigm of teaching. So online education isn't about throwing courses online. It's about the integration of the data, personalization. Is that kind of where you guys see that too? Is that am I on base there or what? You absolutely are, but both online. So we are moving more substantially online. But also in the on-campus experience. So we can help our students get the most out of that on-campus experience. And in fact, we can help them to help themselves. So we're starting to see changes in behavior already where students are competing with each other to be the most engaged student on the course. So that's got to be a good thing. That really has. I have four kids and my oldest is 20, youngest is 12 and Davis four two. But we're living in a generation now where it can't be boring. I mean school should be fun. And what we found is I've found as a parent, also observation through the social media side is you can create a diverse learning environment with data to understand what the needs are. And it's just like selling them something. You can sell them knowledge for making it exciting. Absolutely that. And so one of the other things we're doing in the university is so-called flip learning. And so the idea there is to give the students the homework in advance and then concentrate on the areas that students are struggling with in the lesson or the lecture rather than the other way around which the traditional way is to do the lecture and then give them the homework. And everyone knows everyone struggles with the homework because they procrastinate or they just need more time. Yeah, absolutely. So we can start to use- Dave, did you get your homework all the time? Did you get your homework done? I was a math guy. I would always go to class. I didn't get my homework done. Come on, revisionist. That's true, no. Until my kids thought I was an A-student so they found my transcript. I was, when I was in liberal arts and English and history I never did my homework. That's why I converted to math. Yeah, but I'm big on this education stuff because Silicon Valley where I live, it's like how Stanford has had a huge adoption of online courses. But a lot of people like Coursera think that's the answer. Just throw stuff online. It's still boring. I mean, so what we've found and what people are talking about is integrating the physical and virtual spaces together and make it cross-platform. Not, oh, it's only available. Not sure if Stanford's offering intro to computer science and you're not in Palo Alto. And that's as good as it's going to get. Yeah, absolutely. But it's not just about online courseware, is it? No, it's not. It's about blending that experience and taking the best from both worlds. So you can take the online world, the best of that and the power of that. So being able to do things when it suits you most. And there are particular students who that really does suit. But also taking the best of the on campus. So access to the academics, which is what the students value most is that real genuine conversation with the academics, but also with each other and having that real social engagement with others. What are you guys doing with personalization? Because this is where, there's too many kids in the class. I don't feel like I get personalized treatment. I mean, I know this, you can look at it, see whether someone attends with their ID. Is there tooling now where the personalization can be connected? Starting to get there. So you can personalize on any number of levels. So you can personalize on choice of course modules to create personalized pathways through the material. You can start to personalize on the individual types of material that you might use. So different people learn in different ways and therefore might thrive more if they have a video to watch rather than a book to read the opposite applies of course in different circumstances. So to start to personalize and big data gives us a really strong way of starting to identify how you can do that for individual students. It's great conversation. I love this because the advances in personalization and gamification, you see them on the ad tech side because they want to sell stuff. But now you're starting to see the consumer behavior as well because now the benefits aren't just selling a product that's marketing the education. So can you share any gamification techniques you've learned? I mean, we all know rate your professors going very well. You know, that's some gamification. Are there other techniques that you're using with the data to make it a leaderboards? Is there cool things that you're doing? There's all kinds of things you can do and there's all the traditional badges and those sorts of things. The sort of four square concept of being the mayor of the bar or in our case, you know, a king of the library, maybe in our context, that's the sort of thing you start to think about. But one of the things that surprised us in the work we've done so far is that the students themselves are starting to gamify what we're doing. So they're self-organizing or self-covering? Yeah, they are. So one of the things we're starting to notice, for example, is one of the things we measure is students taking library books out because that's a real indicator of success. Of course that's only an indicator of success if you actually read them. Yeah. And so we're starting to see potential for students taking lots of books out of the library because it improves their rating, but all wise to that and we can- One thing they measure, do we see all kinds of books being taken out? Oh, absolutely. I don't suppose if you've got them, there's a better chance you might actually use them. What's the coolest thing that you've seen out of this that's surprised you or not surprised you that you'd like to share with the audience around bringing this new form of IT and data science to a wired campus like Nottingham? I think one of the things we absolutely saw in all of this is that when we talked about all this big data stuff and what we were going to do with it in terms of enhancing the student and tutor relationship, everybody said, oh no, that's big brother. We can't do that. It's too difficult. But when we showed it, no one would give it up. And that really amazed us that everyone who actually experienced all of this, particularly because we were really transparent in what we were doing. So we give the students exactly the same view on their data that the academics get. That's the key, transparency. Talk about the transparency. And talk about the dialogue there. Was there a policy debate? Was there, you know, was it logical? Was it common sense? Was it no-brainer? Within my IT team within the university, we created a thing called the IS Student Committee, the Information Systems Student Committee. And that was a group of student reps, about 20 of them also who came together. And before we did anything significant, we went to talk to them about, how's this going to help you? Because that's the chief end of any project. We don't want to get two years into a project and find that everybody hates it. So we simply really, I suppose it just boils down to talking to the students in an open way about what we're trying to achieve. And then really realizing and understanding it's in their best interests. You know, it's interesting, the privacy game is certainly changing and you could argue many sides, surveillance value. So this is where the transparency, it's an art and science to it. And how would you share with other cohorts out there that are watching who are struggling with this? Maybe they're living in a conservative environment or maybe they're not sure about the technology? I think it's certainly not technology, this really. The technology in this was the easy bit. Took two to three months to get that in. It was pretty much done. It was the following year where we engaged very closely with the academic community, very closely with students, very closely with our suppliers, very closely with my own IT team. And it was that collaboration that made the difference. So I think my biggest advice to anyone who's starting on this journey is to absolutely foster that collaboration. And then as part of that, do a real assessment of how ready you are to do this. And that's not a technical thing at all. That's about, are you prepared to look at the ethical side of this? It's an operational business model change as well. It's a cultural mindset. It's transformation. It's all of that. It sounds like IT and enterprise. It's absolutely that. And so that conversation with everybody, the whole thing. So you agree then that the people process technology, it's the people, it was the biggest. That's the thing that made this successful, was the people. How did the tech enable, with all this data deluge, 10 years ago, could you have done this? No, we couldn't. And I think the reason for that is that because it would have been hard to do, well, two years ago, it was quite tricky to do when it first started, but four years ago it would have been impossible. And just too expensive. Yeah, too expensive. And I think what would have traditionally happened is that because it was expensive and large, we would have created a traditional project. And all of that, that means it's expensive. If we're doing something that's expensive, it has to be a sure bet. And so we'd cast around for the right technology. And so it'd take us two years to pick the right technology. The technology now is such that you can experiment. So when you're experimenting, you can do a small bet for a potentially big payback. Yeah, and see the value, focus on the value piece. Yeah, absolutely. And that's where you can start integrating in, can we change the people? Absolutely. That's the hard part, is changing the people. So it didn't become a technical project that got bogged down in being hard and expensive. Politics. Politics and all of that. It ended up being a, well, here's a show and tell about what this stuff can do, is this useful. But what is the tech behind it? I mean, what is it? HP Idol. We really didn't do the HP Idol thing ourselves. We engaged a HP partner with DTP Solution Paths who were fabulous about, first of all understanding our business problem and secondly, collaborating with us to solve it. Great. Well, I was just saying to the Genome Project, they gave away the genome sequencing that every iPhone or I watch that have everybody in the world. Oh yeah. But education certainly changed. And bringing up the iPhone mobility has changed. Talk about mobile, okay? Obviously, students are on the go. They're involved now in a bi-directional connected way with your technology. What's the mobile impact? What do you guys look at that? Is there a certain view? HVIL 5, native? All of these things come together. We try not to get too, head up on whether it's HTML5 or native, whatever works in the given circumstances, good for us. But it all plays together because actually students using our mobile app is extra intelligence that we can use in a big data sense to be able to do in the physical world what the web world has been doing forever in terms of looking at how people move across a website. We can start to look at how do people move across our campus and how can we optimize what we do. So give an example for the folks out there of what changed radically from a behavior standpoint with the consumers in case of students or faculty that didn't exist before the transformation. Well, two things really, one is early warning. You know, we've got real early warning out of this and the students themselves get early warning now. So they can start in terms of personalization, they can start to personalize their own experience and that's something that we're thinking about quite carefully and very strategically within the universities. How can we make not just personalization but choice? How can we give our students real choice in their education, such that they become co-creators of their own educational experience and that's the prize in all of this. That's going to be the biggest change. Awesome. Mike, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I do want to ask one final question. What's your vision going forward? You've got a good foundation, things you're in the relevant, cutting edge, great consumer tie-in to the vision technology. What's next? What do you guys see this progressing? Oh, I think the possibilities are endless in all of this. We see very much what we've done at the moment as a bridgehead. We've got the sort of buy-in from a broader community across the university. We can start to look at how does this apply to university applicants, such that they end up on the right course in the first place. How does that play through into our graduates getting great jobs and how can we engage with employers around all of this? How does it play into research and how can we pick the right kinds of research that solve real-world problems and work? Also access to networks, I mean, from an employee standpoint, you could have global now access to our crowd network and the CUBE network and other people networks. The possibilities are endless, absolutely endless. The world is flat. Oh, yeah. The world is flat and students now have connections. Yeah, yeah. Being wired is a good thing. You know, some people think it's bad, but it's a double-edged sword. If you do it right, transparency, policies, show the value, people won't give it up. Absolutely. It's just for the young generation. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Live in Boston, we'll be right back with more at this short break.