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Interview with Michael Mathews, CIO , Oral Roberts University, Speaker at 4th Annual Global Big Data Conference August 30 - Sep Posted on : Jul 26 - 2016

We feature speakers at 4th Annual Global Big Data Conference Aug 30 - Sep 1 2016 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Michael Mathews, CIO , Oral Roberts University.

Interview with Michael Mathews

Tell us about yourself and your background.
I am the Chief Information Officer and Global Education Strategist at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa OK. I have spent the balance of 22 years between Cray Research and working Higher education working on transformative efforts in educational technology. I love to solve global challenges in education by understanding big-data, and turning it into personal data that is beneficial to the advancement of individuals and society. I have been privileged to be invited to the White House on two occasions, awarded the Innovator of the Year in 2013 for all colleges and universities by Campus Technology, and winner of the 2012 U.S. Department of Education Business Start-Up Award for students and an innovative advisor.

What have you been working on recently?
I am focused on researching the impact of data from a global perspective. Through ORU’s Global Learning Center and Geovision™ technology for educating the world, we are desirous of exponentially increasing the amount of people who can access and finish degrees.  This will come through ORU’s research of Geonetics™ and application of Geovision technologies. Geonetics™’ is the study of how data, information, and intelligence via geo-related technologies can positively impact a digital world engaged in the Internet of Things (IoT).

Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?
Not one size fits-all, nor does one tool fit-all. For this reason, we have selected a few key tools in education and innovated them into our Geovision™ technology brand name.  The tools that we are using include Virtual Reality by EON Reality, Teleportation and telepresence robots by Revolve Robotics and Double Robotics, an analytical driven Learning Management System by Desire2Learn, and OneCampus virtual concierge services by rSmart.

What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your Leveraging Geonetics Through Geovision Technology talk?
Attendees can expect to be challenged to realize that every day billions of pieces of intelligence are being passed around the world, but only a few of the pieces actually end-up in the right hands at the right time. Geonetics can be equated to an ‘Amber-Alert’ for the billions of pieces of intelligence (big data) that occur every second of every day, and filtering the right pieces into every global citizen’s hands. With genetics being the study of the human gene, and cybernetics the study of humans to machinery, Geonetics becomes the study of technology and digital-data influence around the world, within a digital society.

What are the top 5 use cases of Big Data in Education industry?

1.       With over $19B spent every year on students taking excess credits, big data is being used to reduce the amount of excess credits students take, by using analytical data against all student data. D2L the Leading LMS provider has a degree compass module that proves this use case.

2.       Wireless connectivity across college campuses allows big data and wireless analytics to better understand life and academic patterns to improve the educational experience. Carousel Industries handles NFL stadium analytics and now uses this knowledge to help college and university campuses to collect and analyze this data.

3.       Augmented and Virtual reality has the greatest impact to reduce training time, yet improve learning and student outcomes. EON Reality in conjunction with ORU has Terabytes of visual and interactive learning objects that spans the college enterprise via mobile and large iCube VR rooms.  With over 8,000 learning objects combined with all other campus data, education has the ability to speed up adaptive learning to meet the needs of each student in a personal manner.

4.       Wearable technology has the ability to capture personal behaviors; while that data can be uploaded via wireless and collected in performance learning systems to identify matches of best case and personal scenarios for sleep, fitness, study, eating, and cardio to academic performance ratios.

5.       Big data has the potential to transition outside a flipped-classroom into a flipped-university, providing digital access across the globe, where anyone and everyone participates in a fluid education system, with fluid technology, to meet the fluidity of the global society. We have be

What trends you see in upcoming 6 months?

1.       What was once referred to as ‘nodes on network’ or ‘nodes within the enterprise’ is already transitioning to a ‘person on the network’ or ‘person within the enterprise.’ This transition immediately allows the ‘person’ carry and use the data within the network and enterprise, and when that big data access is leveraged in a personal manner, human intelligence shifts with the knowledge within the data. 

2.       The ability to merge and integrate data via mobile, wearable, and cloud access will become a trend that speeds up the demand for colleges and universities to step up their data-game. Students will self-navigate, and self-plan their own education to career pathways.

3.       Students are capable of far expanding a model of ‘Bring-Your-Own-Device’ into the modality of ‘Bring-Your-Own-Cloud’. When students bring their own cloud and have access to personal and global data that makes the IoT the IoM, the Internet of Me.

 Any closing remarks?
Even though education has been an outlier during the past 15-years of advancements in big data, it will quickly play catch up in a surprising way. As students get access to intelligence, education will truly become open, fluid, and dynamic to meet the changes of our society. The institution we call education may never change, but the access to intelligence via big data that becomes personalize may change the definition of how a person earns and learns and education.