Data Mining and Learning Analytics: Applications in Educational Research

Addresses the impacts of data mining on education and reviews applications in educational research teaching, and learning

This book discusses the insights, challenges, issues, expectations, and practical implementation of data mining (DM) within educational mandates. Initial series of chapters offer a general overview of DM, Learning Analytics (LA), and data collection models in the context of educational research, while also defining and discussing data mining s four guiding principles prediction, clustering, rule association, and outlier detection. The next series of chapters showcase the pedagogical applications of Educational Data Mining (EDM) and feature case studies drawn from Business, Humanities, Health Sciences, Linguistics, and Physical Sciences education that serve to highlight the successes and some of the limitations of data mining research applications in educational settings. The remaining chapters focus exclusively on EDM s emerging role in helping to advance educational research from identifying at–risk students and closing socioeconomic gaps in achievement to aiding in teacher evaluation and facilitating peer conferencing. This book features contributions from international experts in a variety of fields.

Includes case studies where data mining techniques have been effectively applied to advance teaching and learning Addresses applications of data mining in educational research, including: social networking and education; policy and legislation in the classroom; and identification of at–risk students Explores Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to study the effectiveness of online networks in promoting learning and understanding the communication patterns among users and students Features supplementary resources including a primer on foundational aspects of educational mining and learning analytics

Data Mining and Learning Analytics: Applications in Educational Research is written for both scientists in EDM and educators interested in using and integrating DM and LA to improve education and advance educational research.

Samira ElAtia is Associate Professor of Education at The University of Alberta, Canada. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on topics relating to the use of technology to support pedagogical research and education in higher education. Her current research focuses on using e–learning environment and big data for fair and valid longitudinal assessment of, and for, learning within higher education.

Donald Ipperciel is Principal and Professor at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada and was the Canadian Research Chair in Political Philosophy and Canadian Studies between 2002 and 2012. He has authored several books and has contributed chapters and articles in more than 60 publications.  Ipperciel has dedicated many years of research on the questions of e–learning and using technology in education. He is co–editor of the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology since 2010.

Osmar R. Zaiane is Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Canada and Scientific Director of the Alberta Innovates Centre of Machine Learning. A renowned researcher and computer scientist, Dr. Zaiane is former Secretary Treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He obtained the IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Aware in 2009 as well as the ACM SIGKDD Service Award the following year. 

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Education at a Computational Crossroads
Samira ElAtia, Donald Ipperciel and Osmar R. Zaïane

Part I: At the Intersection of Two Fields: EDM

Chapter1: Educational Process Mining: A tutorial and case study using Moodle data sets
Cristóbal Romero, Rebeca Cerezo, Alejandro Bogarín, and Miguel Sánchez–Santillán

Chapter 2: On Big Data and Text Mining in the Humanities
Goeffrey Rockwell and Bettina Berendt

Chapter 3: Finding Predictors in Higher Education
David Eubanks, Billy Evers, and Nancy Smith

Chapter 4: A MOOC on Educational Data Mining
Ryan S. Baker, Yuan Wang, Luc Paquette, Vincent Aleven, Octav Popescu, Jonathan Sewall,  Carolyn Rose, Gaurav Tomar, Oliver Ferschke, Jing Zhang, Michael Cennamo, Stephanie Ogden, Therese Condit, Jose Diaz, Scott Crossley, Danielle Mcnamara, Denise Comer, Collin Lynch, Rebecca Brown, Tiffany Barnes, and Yoav Bergner

Chapter 5: Data Mining and Action Research
Ellina Chernobilsky, Edith Ries, and Joanne Jasmine

Part II: Pedagogical Applications of EDM

Chapter 6: Design of an Adaptive Learning System and Educational Data Mining
Zhiyong Liu and Nick Cercone

Chapter 7: The Geometry of Naïve Bayes: Teaching Probabilities by Drawing Them
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio

Chapter 8: Examining the Learning Networks of a MOOC
Meaghan Brugha and Jean–Paul Restoule

Chapter 9: Exploring the Usefulness of Adaptive eLearning Laboratory Environments in Teaching Medical Science
Thuan Thai and Patsie Polly

Chapter 10: Investigating Co–occurrence Patterns of Learners Grammatical Errors Across Proficiency Levels and Essay Topics Based on Association Analysis
Yutaka Ishii

Part III: EDM and Educational Research

Chapter 11: Mining Learning Sequences in MOOCs: Does Course Design Constrain Students Behaviors or Do Students Shape Their Own Learning?
Lorenzo Vigentini, Simon McIntyre, Negin Mirriahi, and Dennis Alonzo

Chapter 12: Understanding Communication Patterns in MOOCs: Combining Data Mining and Qualitative Methods
Rebecca Eynon, Isis Hjorth, Taha Yasser, and Nabeel Gillani

Chapter 13: An Example of Data Mining: Exploring the Relationship Between Applicant Attributes and Academic Measures of Success in a Pharmacy Program
Dion Brocks and Ken Cor

Chapter 14: A New Way of Seeing: Using a Data Mining Approach to Understand Children s Views of Diversity and Difference in Picture Books
Robin A. Moeller and Hsin–liang Chen

Chapter 15: Data Mining with Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics: Unlocking Access to Schoolchildren′s Language in Diverse Contexts to Improve Instructional and Assessment Practices
Alison L. Bailey, Anne Blackstock–Bernstein, Eve Ryan, and Despina Pitsoulakis