Original Article

International Journal of Electrical Engineering

& Education
The effect of big-data on 0(0) 1–9
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higher education in China DOI: 10.1177/00207209211002076
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and its countermeasures

Fei Bian1 and Xuansheng Wang2

Abstract
Nowadays, China has got into the era of big-data. In the background of big-data infor-
mation era, the management of college students in China has undergone certain
changes, and the trend of student management informationization is obvious.
Universities are momentous places for cultivating talents. The student management
work of universities directly affects the quality of talent training and affects the stability
of colleges and universities (CAU). The internal structure and external environment
faced by higher education are undergoing unprecedented profound changes, bringing
many new situations, new problems and new challenges to the supervision of university
students. Therefore, college education managers need to show solicitude for the
impact of big-data technology on college education management (CEM) and propose
corresponding countermeasures to raise the productivity of college education admin-
istration. This paper concentrates on the characteristics of big-data. On the basis of
investigating the present situation and matters of the development of big-data educa-
tion administration in CAU in China, this paper explores the countermeasures to raise
the innovation of big-data education management (BDEM) in universities in China.

Keywords
Big-data, higher education management, influence, countermeasure

1
Development and Planning Office (Institutional Research Center), Shenzhen Polytechnic, Shenzhen,
Guangdong, China
2
School of Software Engineering, Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Corresponding author:
Xuansheng Wang, School of Software Engineering, Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology, Shenzhen
518057, Guangdong, China.
Email: wangxs820111@163.com
2 International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education 0(0)

Introduction
The government must form an alliance with enterprises, universities and scientific
research institutions, and mobilize and participate extensively to cope with the
challenges of the “big-data” era.1 CAU will be the participants and promoters
of this big-data wave.2 Although there is a confusion about the “Question of
Jobs” in the domain of education big-data in China,3 it has unique conditions in
the big-data of CAU, and the prospects for the research and application of big-
data in education management are broad.4
Management or administration is also named productivity.5 In a sense, how to
manage is in a very important position, which is greater than the weight of other
factors.6 Big-data enables colleges to adopt a more intelligent way to stimulate and
produce new wisdom.7–9
In big-data, communication between deaf and deaf schools is very convenient.
Nevertheless, from another perspective, the arrival of the era of big-data has also
caused many schools in China to question their own educational management
model.10 Therefore, in order to further improve the education administration of
CAU, it is necessary to make education management innovations that conform to
the trend of the times, and take corresponding measures in time for the problems
existing in the education management of CAU.11 Therefore, the education man-
agement of CAU will achieve healthy and stable development, and provide a high-
quality training platform for the qualified persons needed by the world.

Big-data technology
Data in big-data refers to text, pictures, numbers, information, social media, online
magazines, etc., all of which are sources of data.12 Data can record subtle changes
in various things. Big-data technology is a fresh form of data processing that
comes with the growth of technologies such as media, social networks, cloud-
computing, and Internet of Things.13 The “big” of big-data is an abstract big
concept, because the size of its data is not only described by a single quantity,
but the scale of type, capacity and volume is huge.14 Along with the rapid devel-
opment of big-data in China, big-data is an important technology of social man-
agement.15 People can predict the possibility of development and the extent of
damage through the visualization of big-data, so as to effectively give correspond-
ing countermeasures.16

The dual influence of big-data on the development of

education management in China’s CAU
Scientific progress is the gospel of sorrow and joy, with few exceptions.
Negroponte pointed out: “Every technology or science gift has its darkness”.17
Bian and Wang 3

Positive impact
Big-data brings revolutionary power to university data governance models, edu-
cation and teaching, and smart management.

1. Traditional college governance belongs to “elite governance”, which is limited

by the degree of campus informationization and intelligence. The school devel-
opment plans, measures, strategies, etc. cannot be widely communicated to
teachers and students. Managers with strong democratic awareness hold a
small seminar at the top, or communicate in the form of a meeting.18,19 The
interaction between university administrators and teachers and students is not
limited by time and space. There are at least four advantages: first, to collect the
wisdom of the masses that are instrumental to the development of the school
and the advance of various businesses; second, to convey the development strat-
egy and ideas of the school, and to form a synergy; It is to draw closer to the dry
group distance and resolve various contradictions in the bud. Fourth, the
decision-making department keeps marks, realizes the sunshine government,
prevents the right as “willfulness”, and promotes the standardization and sci-
entificization of decision-making.
2. Big-data promotes the work of smart students, which is the general trend.20
Traditional university student management has the shortcomings of rigidity and
lack of flexibility. The development trend of modern education management is:
flexibility. Flexible management requires a life-oriented approach, focusing on
the internal driving force, motivation persistence and management rights degen-
eration that stimulate students’ development.21 In the phase of small data, uni-
versities and colleges want to achieve flexible management, which seems to have
more than enough strength. They can’t grasp the students’ learning, scientific
research, life, social and other information anytime and anywhere, and often go
through the hard-won data, and finally lose their timeliness and seems mean-
ingless. Using big-data technology, it can be used for multi-dimensional and all-
dimensional portraits of students, which is used to analyze students’ academic
situation, predicting the subject, ranking sudden drop, dynamically assessing
student consumption, accurately funding, predicting students’ graduation, guid-
ing individualization, targeting Sexual employment.

The status quo and problems of the development of BDEM

in CAU in China
After the length out to more than 10 years of growth, especially in recent years,
China’s CEM information has got affirmatory achievement. For example, the CIO
system was initially established, financial investment was gradually increased, and
the collaborative innovation model of government, enterprises and universities was
initially established. The effectiveness of education management has begun to show
up. However, there are also problems such as deficiency of top-level
4 International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education 0(0)

schematization, financial security, lack of data talents, and inadequate laws-

regulations and sharing mechanisms.
The current situation of the development of BDEM in China’s CAU

1. The strategic position of education informatization has been established, and

the national educational resources are the initial scale of the service system.

During the process of the growth of educational informatization in China, sev-

eral incidents that have a relatively high impact are: the release of the Outline of the
National Medium- and Long-Term Education Reform and Development Plan in
2010, and reminded of that “the information technology revolution has a revolu-
tionary impact on the development of education and must be Attached great impor-
tance to”; in 2013, the teacher’s information technology application improvement
project was launched; the 2016 education informationization “13th Five-Year
Plan” proposed the campus CIO, and the informationization from bearing educa-
tion and teaching unify to the entire procedure of educating people. The formulat-
ing and implementation of a whole train of plans tells that the strategic role of
China’s education informatization has been set up. The national data center was
basically completed, and the provincial data was also rapidly promoted. 29 infor-
mation systems and various basic databases supporting the core business manage-
ment of students, teachers and schools were built. It is imperative to use cloud
technology to raise the transformation and upgrading of our country’s CEM.

2. The construction of school network teaching environment has been significantly

improved, and the scale of investment in education information has been con-
tinuously growing.

The digital resource coverage rate of more than 60,000 teaching points in
China’s urban and rural areas has reached 100%. The teaching points have
made certain breakthroughs in the construction of digital teaching equipment,
digital resource transmission and the use of digital resources. The goal of full
Internet coverage at all levels of schools is basically achieved, and more than
50% of the total number of teaching places installed and used broadband. In
the vocational education system under the background of education informatio-
nization, 56 network professional teaching digital resource centers have been built,
and open universities at the national level have established more than 30,000 online
resources for continuing education services. The service system was initially estab-
lished. This cloud platform integrates more than 20 provincial-level education
quality-courses and business education cloud service platforms across the country,
forming a good situation of parallel development between schools, enterprises and
schools. Since 2012, the proportion of China’s fiscal education funds to GDP has
remained at 4%. According to CCW Research, from 2013 to 2016, the scope of
informatization construction investment in China’s education industry and the
Bian and Wang 5

investment scale of cloud computing in education sectors all showed a linear

upward trend.

3. Big-data research institutions are emerging one after another, and the discipline
construction plan is being implemented and promoted.

Countries, provinces and cities have set up big-data alliances, big-data industry
alliances, big-data education alliances, chief data officer alliances, big-data
research institutes, and big-data meta-science and related sciences, talent training,
etc. as research objects to make big-data technology better promotes education
and changes in industries, industries and social life. National level big-data
research institutions, such as China Big-data Research Center (Chongqing),
China Education Big-data Research Institute (Shandong Qufu University). Some
local governments, universities and enterprises have also established educational
big-data research institutions. For example, Tsinghua University established a
virtual reality technology laboratory in cooperation with Yipai Technology Co.,
Ltd. in 2016, and established a big-data cloud computing research center in coop-
eration with Weizhuang Holding Co., Ltd. There are also companies that set up
their own data analysis and research, such as Tencent, Ali, Baidu data research,
etc., committed to improving the quality of products and services through data
analysis and research. With the growth of the Internet and big-data technology,
the construction of related disciplines is particularly important. China has
increased the construction of major disciplines related to big-data. As the first
batch of national network security talent training bases, Sichuan University has
obtained a special fund for network security personnel training. With the support
of the Central Network Information Office, the startup amount reached 10 mil-
lion. In addition, the training of big-data science and technology professionals has
also kicked off. The Ministry of Education approved Peking University, University
of International Business and Economics and Central South University in 2016 to
become the first batch CAU of new undergraduate majors in “Data Science and
Big-data Technology”.

Problems in the growth of big-data education administration in China’s CAU

Although China’s CEM big-data platform has got concrete results, there are still
some problems that must be highly valued. For example, the informatization con-
struction of CAU is uneven, and the management of the university has insufficient
understanding of big-data and cloud computing technology and has not paid
enough attention to it. In the wave of dataization, whoever can seize the oppor-
tunity in time will be able to occupy the competitive highland. All universities in
China should further strengthen their efforts in top-level design, system and mech-
anism, technology research and development, and promotion and exploration. We
must adhere to the principle of “people-oriented” and “green technology” and
raise the co-construction, sharing and sharing of data resources. Big-data
6 International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education 0(0)

technology has truly become a tool to promote students’ all-round development,

intelligent education management and school connotation construction. At pre-
sent, there are the following questions in the growth of university BDEM:

(1) Lack of system planning. China’s data center and redundant construction are
serious, including the university data center, which is a common problem. At
present, every department, unit and department of CAU is an “independent king-
dom.” Each family has its own IT system based on its own needs, and there is no
unified system. There are various problems such as cost, performance, safety and
energy management, which pose great challenges and inconveniences to the edu-
cation administration of CAU. Each school has dozens or even hundreds of por-
tals and functional departments, secondary college websites, etc. Generally
speaking, these websites do not have high requirements for servers, but they all
build their own independent physical servers, which are expensive and leads to a
serious waste of resources.

(2) Lack of legal system. The building and service of big-data platform will turn into
a significant topic for the growth of CAU in the future. Then the weak link that
comes with it is the issue of maintenance, not the problem of construction. Due to
the intricate crowds and data applications, the security and management issues of
college big-data platforms have become increasingly prominent, which has brought
enormous challenges to CAU. China’s big-data rule of law construction is obvi-
ously lagging behind. At present, the relevant laws and regulations regulating
network technology and protecting personal privacy have not met the needs of
practice. In the meantime, the law on promoting the development of school
BDEM is not perfect.

(3) Lack of professional support. The huge market and lack of talents are the biggest
advantages and the biggest disadvantages faced by China’s big-data development.
At present, the big-data industry is hot, and the competition between talents in the
academic and business circles is fierce at home and abroad. Moreover, China has
not yet set up a training mechanism that is conducive to the emergence of big-data
talents. At the moment, nearly 100 CAU across the country have undergraduate
majors in information security, and the training of information technology talents
has embarked on the road of specialization. But talent in information technology,
information security and big-data applications is still in short supply .

(4) Lack of collaborative innovation. At the moment, the growth of big-data education
administration in CAU still has the problem of insufficient school-enterprise coop-
eration. There are not many big-data application products, and there are not many
active enterprises. China’s CEM software is not mature enough. Because enter-
prises are good at technology and shorter than business, CAU are good at business
but shorter than technology. Finally, there are still problems in the promotion of
excellent smart education programs. Compared with the wisdom education in
Bian and Wang 7

developed countries, China’s wisdom education started late and lacked effective
publicity, which led to the excellent use of excellent educational equipment, teach-
ing resources and smart application programs.

The countermeasures of big-data in the management of

college education in China
Building a high-level education management team
The arrival of the phase of big-data has enabled the production and living tech-
nologies of various industries and fields to be effectively improved. The education
industry is no exception. In the procedure of CEM, the use of big-data and the
value of assistive technology is the most important thing is the talents who have
big-data thought and big-data analytical skills. At present, among the CEM teams
in China, there are serious shortages of teachers who have both big-data analytical
skills and education management capabilities. Therefore, it is a very important task
to maximize the role of big-data technology. It is obliged to set up a university
education management team with big-data analysis ability, and attach significance
to the education and teaching management process from the ideological point of
view. In the collection and arrangement of all kinds of big-data, we must closely
grasp the data analysis on the education management data platform and draw
accurate conclusions.

Improve the use of big-data

The widespread use of big-data in CEM may result in the disclosure of privacy-
information of some students, and there may be problems that threaten the indi-
vidual safety of students, so that students are hurt. As a result, in the procedure of
using big-data and corresponding assistive technologies, college education manag-
ers must establish sound and complete rules for the use of big-data, and harmonize
the relevant standards for big-data collection and application. In the meantime, we
must ensure the data sharing among the various departments of the university,
which is conducive to students’ data collation and information sharing. It is nec-
essary to scientifically and reasonably regulate the data collection process and the
authority and scope of sharing data, and to ensure the security of data from the
system. The use of big-data and related assistive technologies is the most basic of
the education management in CAU. At present, the amount of student informa-
tion data in many CAU in China is very large, and big-data needs to collect
information scattered among various departments. This is conducive to the overall
application of big-data to the education and teaching management of CAU, thus
reflecting the maximum value of data.
8 International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education 0(0)

Conclusion
The widespread application of current big-data technology has produced certain
impacts and impacts to the whole society. Under the influence of this new tech-
nology, the growth of education management in CAU is also facing some major
changes. Through the analysis of the advantages and features of big-data technol-
ogy, it can be seen that the application of big-data technology in the education
management of CAU can actively reverse the shortcomings brought by traditional
management forms and actively help CAU to form better benign effects in
management.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Special Research
Project on College Philosophy and Social Sciences in 2019 of the 13th Five-Year Plan for
Educational Science in Guangdong Province (2019GXJK242); Shenzhen Educational
Science Planning Project in 2020 (ybzz20010); Shenzhen Infrastructure Project
(JCYJ20170306095959113).

ORCID iD
Xuansheng Wang https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1790-524X

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