Imagine you're at the Ed Innovation conference. You've just heard a pitch from a start-up. Basically, they wrap whatever content customers are using in formative and summative assessments and then use "the big data" to identify which content is most effective and then recommend it to students, modified by personalization algorithms based on student preferences that they've deduced by watching their behavior in the LMS. "We want to be the Netflix of learning content." Now you're sitting at a bar with a venture capitalist, a university provost, and a member of a state legislature. They all think the pitch from the start-up was awesome.

Your job is to explain to these three why the pitch they heard was not as spectacular as they thought it was, and what a genuinely good big data pitch would have to look like.

from Michael Feldstein