Unpacking Big Data in Education. A research framework

The use of big data represents a valuable way to inspire decision making in a time of scarce resources. The technological revolution is in fact enabling governments to use a great variety of digital tools and data to manage all phases of the policy cycle process, becoming a core element for e-governance applications and techniques. However, research seems not aligned yet with the hybrid environment on which both public policies and politics seem to move, meantime actors (old and new) and the decision processes, in their searching for automation and objectivity, are at risk to become opaque. Taking the case of High Education, this article proposes a research framework on big-data use to open up the reflection on the power of “evidences” in decision making; to question and contextualize such evidences in a multimodal and integrated scenario, and to understand the challenges that data will pose to education both in terms of unforeseen and hidden effects (Lynch 2015).