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Mark Fitzsimons
Senior Education Solutions Specialist, Microsoft Western Europe
Education institutions around the world are embracing a hybrid learning model. Yet many face challenges with data and AI due to dispersed or poorly governed assets and a lack of access to skilled professionals. Open Education Analytics (OEA) works to empower education institutions to overcome these hurdles to improve learning outcomes and provide students with the best possible education experience.
OEA is an open-source community of education and technology partners and customers working together to build solutions for the education sector using Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI. Coordinated by Microsoft Education, the community helps institutions to adapt their analytics tools to enable a range of use cases, from personalized learning paths to real-time reporting.
OEA has been designed in partnership with both K12 and Higher Education institutions, drawing on community-developed frameworks and assets to support education customers at both levels achieve their goals. Through simplified data lakes in Microsoft Azure and secure asset sharing, the community helps institutions use data, analytics and AI more effectively and ethically.
Participating in OEA provides a host of benefits. Education institutions can build machine learning models that can predict at-risk or vulnerable students, and use insights and reporting to better engage students, parents and educators.
By analyzing data, institutions can also receive personalized recommendations across content skills, assessment and wellbeing that can be adopted to create learning environments that empower students to succeed.
One success story is the City of Helsinki. After examining key use cases, its team built an AI Hub using Microsoft Azure, improving the visibility of data to help them make better decisions about students’ futures.
They attribute much of their success to support from the OEA community. “It’s vital having a dialogue with others on the same journey. It’s difficult to find this kind of community, to be a rebel without a support system,” says Pasi Silander, Head of ICT Development Programs in the City of Helsinki Education Division.
Participating in OEA can yield a number of cost-saving benefits too. By implementing AI responsibly, institutions can validate the impact of investments and identify where additional investment is needed. And using prebuilt modules, packages and data schemes also helps reduce the cost of delivering organization-wide data solutions.
When education systems join OEA, they become part of a global community of education peers working to build and share learnings and solutions. To start your journey and join the community, can contact us at eduservices@microsoft.com.