"NetFlix portals"

Recently an article was posted in the Chronicle about a new software package called "Sherpa" which tries to mine the data in a SIS to present students with information relavent to them (similar to how NetFlix and Amazon suggest ideas for other products.)

• Have the ability to present information such as links for tutoring to students who have a low GPA, let them know that a class they need is filling up quickly, etc.
  • Let students know about incomplete prerequisites, upcoming deadlines, etc.
• How do you access data about students and give them info they need vs how do you take information about what they're doing/like/etc. and give them possible ideas about other things they might like?
  • • Improve student retention?
    • Give the students an edge by being proactive?
    • "Students who took this class also took..."
  • Need to store lots of attributes about the users, their activities in the system, etc.
  • Takes the emphasis off of logically being able to delineate information based on a set of specific criteria (eg. GPA<2.0) and becomes about inferences based on historical information from other users
  • Facebook integration?
    • Extended permissions can allow an app to query additional information about likes/dislikes, etc.
  • Are there legal implications to using student data in this manner?
  • "Big brother"?
• Mined information versus volunteered informaiton
  • FERPA....
  • The mined information would need to be really anonymous (just because I came from a certain town, I don't necessarily want classmates from my hometown knowing I'm here... ("don't make me a marketing object"))
  • As a student, it's "my data" - don't want it to be used for "commercial" purposes
  • Allow the users to opt-in to certain things that aren't easily determinable by other attributes?
  • Unless there is a really good reason, most people won't volunteer the extra information
    • must show benefits, and they have to be more than the opportunity to get spammed.
• Need to be able to constrain what kinds of information is pushed out to the users
  • "Everyone cares about my carwash tomorrow, so I'm going to send it out to everyone!"
• Combined "intelligent" content plus "contextual" content
  • Providing relevant information based on user attributes/preferences/associations, but at the same time, floating time-sensitive things to the top irregardless of other stuff
    • (eg. - you need to petition to graduate would float to the top.)
• Being able to integrate not specifically with Facebook, etc. but developing a good back-end infrastructure to be able to reuse as much code as possible for a transition to the "next big thing."