Tech’s big data innovations hold enormous potential for improvements across industries, including academic institutions. In addition to it efficacy, the general availability of tech through smart devices has set an operational precedent for most competitive organizations. In an effort to provide the most contemporary education and improve internal processes, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is updating staff and student procedures with the tech benefits provided by its partners Dell Technologies Inc. and Nutanix Inc.

“Students today expect their faculty to be technology savvy … to be online [and] use devices. … We’re seeing significant transformations in education, which is hasn’t changed much in 2,000 years,” said David Comroe (pictured), senior information technology director for academic computing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Comroe spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the effect of Wharton’s digital transformation and how the school plans to incorporate technology moving forward. (* Disclosure below.)

Elevating education with data

With 13 years of experience leading IT efforts for the largest business school faculty in the world, Comroe has seen student career goals shift at Wharton with the evolution of technology. Where students were once driven by a desire to work in banking or found a start-up, today’s grads are more interested in the potential of a role in analytics.

“Our dean … really wants to position Wharton as the analytics school. Every company in the world is trying to hire these kinds of people. There just frankly aren’t enough of them out there,” Comroe said.

Positioning Wharton as the analytics school requires a significant amount of technology on the backend, which the institution receives support in from its partners Dell and Nutanix. “Dell and Nutanix are providing us with their hyperconvergence infrastructure, their cloud offerings. … They’re collecting huge amounts of data, running these reports … and creating these algorithms that do incredible things,” Comroe stated.

Wharton is leveraging this partnership toward innovations across the school through its new grading system, the Wharton Online Ordinal Peer Performance Evaluation Engine (WHOOPPEE). Instead of traditional grading systems that are fraught with inherent bias, WHOOPPEE combines peer project rankings with an algorithm to generate a more comprehensive final grade for students.

Comroe says the new method is improving efficiency and helping students to better learn the material through exposure to the perspectives of their peers. “We’re seeing some empirical evidence … that they’re learning more … and we’re getting much better grading,” he said.

Comroe believes working with Dell and Nutanix has enabled Wharton to offer a better, more relevant education to students. “Having the best students, the brightest faculty, the best, hardest-working staff, we need high-quality partners — not just vendors who care about the transaction. That’s really the bottom line for us,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Nutanix Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Nutanix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE