A significant body of recent research in the field of Learning Analytics has
focused on leveraging machine learning approaches for predicting at-risk
students in order to initiate timely interventions and thereby elevate
retention and completion rates. The overarching feature of the majority of
these research studies has been on the science of prediction only. The
component of predictive analytics concerned with interpreting the internals of
the models and explaining their predictions for individual cases to
stakeholders has largely been neglected. Additionally, works that attempt to
employ data-driven prescriptive analytics to automatically generate
evidence-based remedial advice for at-risk learners are in their infancy.
eXplainable AI is a field that has recently emerged providing cutting-edge
tools which support transparent predictive analytics and techniques for
generating tailored advice for at-risk students. This study proposes a novel
framework that unifies both transparent machine learning as well as techniques
for enabling prescriptive analytics, while integrating the latest advances in
large language models. This work practically demonstrates the proposed
framework using predictive models for identifying at-risk learners of programme
non-completion. The study then further demonstrates how predictive modelling
can be augmented with prescriptive analytics on two case studies in order to
generate human-readable prescriptive feedback for those who are at risk using
ChatGPT.Comment: revision of the original paper to include ChatGPT integratio