Your Secret Sauce is not so Secret
In the predictive analytics space, there is always talk about secret sauce. The roots of it make sense to me. Think about the financial industry...if you built a model that could predict future trends in stock prices, you'd probably want to keep that a secret. In the education space, though, the logic starts to break down. First of all, education is a highly collaborative space and it represents a social good. Keeping a valuable secret that might help students succeed is antithetical to the nature of education. Second, education is a complex ecosystem of people, processes, policies, content, etc. I would have strong doubts about anyone who claimed to have a formula that worked for a wide variety of institutions. Third, I think it creates an element of distrust.…