Emergence of Unstructured Data and Scope of Big Data in Indian Education

The Indian Education sector has grown exponentially in the last few decades as per various official reports. Large amount of information pertaining to education sector is generated every year. This has led to the requirement for managing and analyzing the structured and unstructured information related to various stakeholders. At the same time there is a need to adapt to the dynamic global world by channelizing young talent in appropriate domains by cognizing and deriving the knowledge about individual student preferences hidden within the vast amount of education data. The derived knowledge is about getting finer information related to courses, facility and quality of institutes, etc and also analyzing unstructured educational learning resources present in the form of multimedia data. Also, the desire to cater to stakeholders for decision making related to courses, admissions, career planning etc has accentuated big data analytics. Various MIS or ERP systems handling structured information for educational applications exist in order to aid in the administration and managerial process. These systems are useful in customizing software application as per institutes or courses, generating various customizable reports and aiding the decision making process related to institutes. The need for storing, maintaining and analyzing unstructured information related to multimedia content online has generated a need for big data and data analytics. This paper is about the emergence of unstructured data, comparison of features provided by relational databases and big data and to identify the scope of big data in the Indian education sector. Keywords—Big Data; Indian Education; Unstructured data; Big Data Analytics; Comparative of Big data and Relational Database; Scope of Big Data based Applications