Educational Data Mining

Learners leave behind many traces when interacting with an electronic learning environment. Students who use an online environment leave behind their interactions with, for example, simulations, the electronic products they produce (such as concept maps and models), and their chats. Students who use a learning management system (LMS) also leave traces, such as the duration of their visit, the documents they downloaded, the pages they visited, and so forth. Analyzing these data with the goal of discovering unexpected relational patterns is the subject of educational data mining; in the related field of learning analytics, learners’ online data are examined in order to detect predefined patterns. The distinction between the two fields thus basically concerns pattern searching versus pattern recognition. Educational data mining and learning analytics ...