Facilitating Scientometrics in Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining – the LAK Dataset

The Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Dataset represents an unprecedented corpus which exposes a near complete collection of bibliographic resources for a specific research discipline, namely the connected areas of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. Covering over five years of scientific literature from the most relevant conferences and journals, the dataset provides Linked Data about bibliographic metadata as well as full text of the paper body. The latter was enabled through special licensing agreements with ACM for publications not yet available through open access. The dataset has been designed following established Linked Data pattern, reusing established vocabularies and providing links to established schemas and entity coreferences in related datasets. Given the temporal and topic coverage of the dataset, being a near-complete corpus of research publications of a particular discipline, it facilitates scientometric investigations, for instance, about the evolution of a scientific field over time, or correlations with other disciplines, what is documented through its usage in a wide range of scientific studies and applications

Learning Analytics to Inform Teaching and Learning Approaches

Learning analytics is an evolving discipline with capability for educational data analysis to enable better understanding of learning processes. This paper reports on learning analytics research at Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, Ireland, that indicated measureable factors can identify first year students at risk of failing based on data available prior to commencement of first year of study. The study was conducted over three years, 2010 to 2012, on a student population from a range of academic disciplines (n=1,207). Data was gathered from both student enrolment data maintained by college administration, and an online, self-reporting tool administered during induction sessions for students enrolling into the first year of study. Factors considered included prior academic performance, personality, motivation, self- regulation, learning approaches, learner modality, age and gender. A k-NN classification model trained on data from the 2010 and 2011 student cohort, and tested on data from the 2012 student cohort correctly identified 74% of students at risk of failing. Some factors predictive of at-risk students are malleable, and relate to an effective learning disposition; specifically, factors relating to self-regulation and motivation. This paper discusses potential benefits of measurement of learner disposition

A Brief Survey of Deep Learning Approaches for Learning Analytics on MOOCs

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) systems have become prevalent in recent years and draw more attention, a.o., due to the coronavirus pandemic’s impact. However, there is a well-known higher chance of dropout from MOOCs than from conventional off-line courses. Researchers have implemented extensive methods to explore the reasons behind learner attrition or lack of interest to apply timely interventions. The recent success of neural networks has revolutionised extensive Learning Analytics (LA) tasks. More recently, the associated deep learning techniques are increasingly deployed to address the dropout prediction problem. This survey gives a timely and succinct overview of deep learning techniques for MOOCs’ learning analytics. We mainly analyse the trends of feature processing and the model design in dropout prediction, respectively. Moreover, the recent incremental improvements over existing deep learning techniques and the commonly used public data sets have been presented. Finally, the paper proposes three future research directions in the field: knowledge graphs with learning analytics, comprehensive social network analysis, composite behavioural analysis

Analyse de l'apprentissage humain dans la plateforme SIDES 3.0 : une approche basée sur la sémantique

National audienceSIDES 3.0 est un projet national français visant à fournir aux étudiants en médecine des services intelligents pour soutenir l'apprentissage en ligne dans le Système Intelligent d'Enseignement en Santé 3.0 (SIDES). La plateforme SIDES contient un grand nombre de ressources d'apprentissage annotées, notam-ment des questions de formation et d'évaluation, et recueille les traces d'apprentissage des étudiants. Ces annotations de ressources et traces d'apprentissage ont été intégrées sous la forme d'un graphe RDF, et en-richies grâce à des ontologies. Cet article présente les résultats de l'analyse de l'apprentissage des étudiants dans la plateforme SIDES en exploitant le graphe de connaissances associé en reposant sur les technologies du Web sémantique. Cette analyse est préliminaire à la conception et mise en oeuvre des fonctionnalités visant à permettre un apprentissage personnalisé et adaptatif sur la plateforme

A Survey of Scholarly Data: From Big Data Perspective

Recently, there has been a shifting focus of organizations and governments towards digitization of academic and technical documents, adding a new facet to the concept of digital libraries. The volume, variety and velocity of this generated data, satisfies the big data definition, as a result of which, this scholarly reserve is popularly referred to as big scholarly data. In order to facilitate data analytics for big scholarly data, architectures and services for the same need to be developed. The evolving nature of research problems has made them essentially interdisciplinary. As a result, there is a growing demand for scholarly applications like collaborator discovery, expert finding and research recommendation systems, in addition to several others. This research paper investigates the current trends and identifies the existing challenges in development of a big scholarly data platform, with specific focus on directions for future research and maps them to the different phases of the big data lifecycle

Investigating the Efficacy of Algorithmic Student Modelling in Predicting Students at Risk of Failing in the Early Stages of Tertiary Education: Case study of experience based on first year students at an Institute of Technology in Ireland.

The application of data analytics to educational settings is an emerging and growing research area. Much of the published works to-date are based on ever-increasing volumes of log data that are systematically gathered in virtual learning environments as part of module delivery. This thesis took a unique approach to modelling academic performance; it is a first study to model indicators of students at risk of failing in first year of tertiary education, based on data gathered prior to commencement of first year, facilitating early engagement with at-risk students. The study was conducted over three years, in 2010 through 2012, and was based on a sample student population (n=1,207) aged between 18 and 60 from a range of academic disciplines. Data was extracted from both student enrolment data maintained by college administration, and an online, self-reporting, learner profiling tool developed specifically for this study. The profiling tool was administered during induction sessions for students enrolling into the first year of study. Twenty-four factors relating to prior academic performance, personality, motivation, self-regulation, learning approaches, learner modality, age and gender were considered. Eight classification algorithms were evaluated. Cross validation model accuracies based on all participants were compared with models trained on the 2010 and 2011 student cohorts, and tested on the 2012 student cohort. Best cross validation model accuracies were a Support Vector Machine (82%) and Neural Network (75%). The k-Nearest Neighbour model, which has received little attention in educational data mining studies, achieved highest model accuracy when applied to the 2012 student cohort (72%). The performance was similar to its cross validation model accuracy (72%). Model accuracies for other algorithms applied to the 2012 student cohort also compared favourably; for example Ensembles (71%), Support Vector Machine (70%) and a Decision Tree (70%). Models of subgroups by age and by academic discipline achieved higher accuracy than models of all participants, however, a larger sample size is needed to confirm results. Progressive sampling showed a sample size \u3e 900 was required to achieve convergence of model accuracy. Results showed that factors most predictive of academic performance in first year of study at tertiary education included age, prior academic performance and self-efficacy. Kinaesthetic modality was also indicative of students at risk of failing, a factor that has not been cited previously as a significant predictor of academic performance. Models reported in this study show that learner profiling completed prior to commencement of first year of study yielded informative and generalisable results that identified students at risk of failing. Additionally, model accuracies were comparable to models reported elsewhere that included data collected from student activity in semester one, confirming the validity of early student profiling

An Investigation of Autism Support Groups on Facebook

Autism-affected users, such as autism patients, caregivers, parents, family members, and researchers, currently seek informational support and social support from communities on social media. To reveal the information needs of autism- affected users, this study centers on the research of users’ interactions and information sharing within autism communities on social media. It aims to understand how autism-affected users utilize support groups on Facebook. A systematic method was proposed to aid in the data analysis including social network analysis, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and inferential analysis. Social network analysis method was adopted to reveal the interaction patterns appearing in the groups, and topic modeling method was employed to uncover the discussion themes that users were concerned with in their daily lives. Sentiment analysis method helped analyze the emotional characteristics of the content that users expressed in the groups. Inferential analysis method was applied to compare the similarities and differences among different autism support groups found on Facebook. This study collected user-generated content from five sampled support groups (an awareness group, a treatment group, a parents group, a research group, and a local support group) on Facebook. Findings show that the discussion topics varied in different groups. Influential users in each Facebook support group were identified through the analysis of the interaction network. The results indicated that the influential users not only attracted more attention from other group members but also led the discussion topics in the group. In addition, it was examined that autism support groups on Facebook offered a supportive emotional atmosphere for group members. The findings of this study revealed the characteristics of user interactions and information exchanges in autism support groups on social media. Theoretically, the findings demonstrated the significance of social media for autism users. The unique implication of this study is to identify support groups on Facebook as a source of informational, social, and emotional support for autism-related users. The methodology applied in this study presented a systematic approach to evaluating the information exchange in health-related support groups on social media. Further, it investigated the potential role of technology in the social lives of autism-related users. The outcomes of this study can contribute to improving online intervention programs by highlighting effective communication approaches

Predicting Paid Certification in Massive Open Online Courses

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been proliferating because of the free or low-cost offering of content for learners, attracting the attention of many stakeholders across the entire educational landscape. Since 2012, coined as “the Year of the MOOCs”, several platforms have gathered millions of learners in just a decade. Nevertheless, the certification rate of both free and paid courses has been low, and only about 4.5–13% and 1–3%, respectively, of the total number of enrolled learners obtain a certificate at the end of their courses. Still, most research concentrates on completion, ignoring the certification problem, and especially its financial aspects. Thus, the research described in the present thesis aimed to investigate paid certification in MOOCs, for the first time, in a comprehensive way, and as early as the first week of the course, by exploring its various levels. First, the latent correlation between learner activities and their paid certification decisions was examined by (1) statistically comparing the activities of non-paying learners with course purchasers and (2) predicting paid certification using different machine learning (ML) techniques. Our temporal (weekly) analysis showed statistical significance at various levels when comparing the activities of non-paying learners with those of the certificate purchasers across the five courses analysed. Furthermore, we used the learner’s activities (number of step accesses, attempts, correct and wrong answers, and time spent on learning steps) to build our paid certification predictor, which achieved promising balanced accuracies (BAs), ranging from 0.77 to 0.95. Having employed simple predictions based on a few clickstream variables, we then analysed more in-depth what other information can be extracted from MOOC interaction (namely discussion forums) for paid certification prediction. However, to better explore the learners’ discussion forums, we built, as an original contribution, MOOCSent, a cross- platform review-based sentiment classifier, using over 1.2 million MOOC sentiment-labelled reviews. MOOCSent addresses various limitations of the current sentiment classifiers including (1) using one single source of data (previous literature on sentiment classification in MOOCs was based on single platforms only, and hence less generalisable, with relatively low number of instances compared to our obtained dataset;) (2) lower model outputs, where most of the current models are based on 2-polar iii iv classifier (positive or negative only); (3) disregarding important sentiment indicators, such as emojis and emoticons, during text embedding; and (4) reporting average performance metrics only, preventing the evaluation of model performance at the level of class (sentiment). Finally, and with the help of MOOCSent, we used the learners’ discussion forums to predict paid certification after annotating learners’ comments and replies with the sentiment using MOOCSent. This multi-input model contains raw data (learner textual inputs), sentiment classification generated by MOOCSent, computed features (number of likes received for each textual input), and several features extracted from the texts (character counts, word counts, and part of speech (POS) tags for each textual instance). This experiment adopted various deep predictive approaches – specifically that allow multi-input architecture - to early (i.e., weekly) investigate if data obtained from MOOC learners’ interaction in discussion forums can predict learners’ purchase decisions (certification). Considering the staggeringly low rate of paid certification in MOOCs, this present thesis contributes to the knowledge and field of MOOC learner analytics with predicting paid certification, for the first time, at such a comprehensive (with data from over 200 thousand learners from 5 different discipline courses), actionable (analysing learners decision from the first week of the course) and longitudinal (with 23 runs from 2013 to 2017) scale. The present thesis contributes with (1) investigating various conventional and deep ML approaches for predicting paid certification in MOOCs using learner clickstreams (Chapter 5) and course discussion forums (Chapter 7), (2) building the largest MOOC sentiment classifier (MOOCSent) based on learners’ reviews of the courses from the leading MOOC platforms, namely Coursera, FutureLearn and Udemy, and handles emojis and emoticons using dedicated lexicons that contain over three thousand corresponding explanatory words/phrases, (3) proposing and developing, for the first time, multi-input model for predicting certification based on the data from discussion forums which synchronously processes the textual (comments and replies) and numerical (number of likes posted and received, sentiments) data from the forums, adapting the suitable classifier for each type of data as explained in detail in Chapter 7

TOWARDS A LEARNING ANALYTICS REFERENCE FRAMEWORK TO PREDICT AT-RISK STUDENTS AT THE FACULTY OF MILITARY SCIENCE

School for Geospatial Studies and Information System