Behind the scenes of educational data mining
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Behind the scenes of educational data mining Yael Feldman-Maggor 1,2 Inbal Tuvi-Arad 2
& Sagiv
Barhoom 2,3 & Ron Blonder 1
&
Received: 6 April 2020 / Accepted: 18 August 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Research based on educational data mining conducted at academic institutions is often limited by the institutional policy with regard to the type of learning management system and the detail level of its activity reports. Often, researchers deal with only raw data. Such data normally contain numerous fictitious user activities that can create a bias in the activity trends, consequently leading to inaccurate conclusions unless careful strategies for data cleaning, filtering, and indexing are applied. In addition, preprocessing phases are not always reported in detail in the scientific literature. As educational data mining and learning analytics methodologies become increasingly popular in educational research, it is important to promote researchers and educational policymakers’ awareness of the pre-processing phase, which is essential to create a reliable database prior to any analysis. This phase can be divided into four consecutive pre-processing stages: data gathering, data interpretation, database creation, and data organization. Taken together, these stages stress the technical and cooperative nature of this type of research, and the need for careful interpretation of the studied parameters. To illustrate these aspects, we applied these stages to online educational data collected from several chemistry courses conducted at two academic institutions. Our results show that adequate pre-processing of the data can prevent major inaccuracies in the research findings, and significantly increase the authenticity and reliability of the conclusions. Keywords Learning analytics . Educational data mining . Data pre-processing . Learning
management system (LMS) . Moodle . Higher education * Ron Blonder [email protected] * Inbal Tuvi-Arad [email protected]
1
Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
2
Department of Natural Sciences, The Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, Israel
3
Department of Information Systems, Computer Center, The Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, Israel
Education and Information Technologies
1 Introduction The development of the internet has led many academic institutions around the world to offer a growing number of online distance learning courses (ODLCs). Many ODLCs are designed and built using a learning management system (LMS) that functions as the course’s learning website. Although the LMS has become an essential part of any ODLC, it is also a very useful tool to complement traditional learning. Some LMSs are closed systems that are marketed to academic institutions and schools without the ability to make any changes. Other LMSs function as open sources, and enable each institution to make changes according to its specific needs (Islam 2014). A LMS facilitates the delivery of hi
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