Imminent Challenges of Adoption of Big Data in Educational Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa Nations

Abstract

Exponential technological development as seen in the 21st century has led to the generation of the very large volume of data in different formats and at a very high speed, such that traditional processing methods cannot be used to process these data. With the evolution of big data and its processing techniques, useful information has been derived from these volumes of data that has been useful in decision making in various domains, education inclusive. In the developed economy land stride has been made in the use of big data analytics especially academic and learning analytics, but such cannot be said in the developing economy like sub-Saharan Africa. Researchers have done thorough work on the benefits and challenges of big data as a trend and in extension big data analytics in education. This work systematically reviewed works in big data, academic analytics, learning analytics, identifying generalized challenges of big data and it extends to identifying salient factors that are hindering adoption of big data in educationin sub-Saharan Africa in line with the 4th sustainable development goal 2030Development Agenda of the United Nations; using online sources as it bulk of data collection. These issues that formed the gap are addressed in the different sections of the article.