Research on the innovation and application of big data in higher education

The appearance of big data provides many changes to our daily lives. Among these changes, the innovation and application of big data in higher education are greatly remarkable. Therefore, the paper firstly analyzes the background of big data appearance. Then the paper describes the main application in higher education, which includes improving college planning, promoting college development, obtaining the teaching reality, enhancing teaching efficiency, optimizing learning experience, improving learning quality and boosting science research. After that, the paper provides two technologies of big data analysis: educational data mining and learning analysis. The applications of the two technologies in higher education mainly include classification, forecast, clustering, outlier detection and others. At the same while, the paper also describes the challenges of big data application in higher education, which are epistemology, methodology, technology, law, ethic and other dilemma.