Using Big Data in the Academic Environment

Massive amounts of data are collected across social media sites, mobile communications, business environments and institutions. In order to efficiently analyze this large quantity of raw data, the concept of Big Data was introduced. This new concept is expected to help education in the near future, by changing the way we approach the e-learning process, by encouraging the interaction between students and teachers, by allowing the fulfilment of the individual requirements and goals of learners.The paper discusses aspects regarding the evolution of Big Data technologies, the way of applying them to e-Learning and their influence on the academic environment. Also, we have designed a three-step system architecture for a consortium of universities, based on actual software solutions, having the purpose to analyze, organize and access huge data sets in the Cloud environment. We focused our research on exploring unstructured data using the graphical Gephi tool.