Justin Reich, a HarvardX research fellow, summarizes a recent series of MOOC studies and concludes that “learning environments that are capable of tracking trillions of learner actions down to the millisecond have led to a breakthrough in education research: being active in a learning environment may be a powerful predictor of doing well in that learning environment. That is to say: students who do stuff also do more stuff, and they do stuff better.” Reich highlights that the studies are “compressing rich detailed data into very simple summary statistics” and proposes that “if a study of online learning simply shows that activity predicts further activity or effort, maybe we need not spend time writing up that study.”
http://blogs.edweek.org/dtechresearcher/2014/03/big_data.html