Educational Data Mining: A review of evaluation process in the e-learning

What is it about?

Due to the growing interest in e-learning as an important process of teaching and learning, new mechanisms to evaluate its pedagogical effectiveness are necessaries. This review describes the scenario of 20 years corresponding to data mining research where the context is the e-learning and the main subject is the evaluation aspect, which is considered a latent problem within this environment. Our goal is to provide an unexplored review of EDM research of the teaching and learning process considering the educational perspective. In order to obtain a more wide and complete review, the search of the bibliographic material was realized with the terms “data mining” and “education” which resulted in 525 articles. As exclusion criterion, articles that did not emphasize the improvement of the teaching and learning process were discarded, resulting in 72 articles. As result of our review, the analyzed papers show that the researches in EDM expanded into several areas and themes, for example, oriented studies on interactions between the educational actors, monitoring, and evaluation of teaching-learning process, administrators’ evaluation about the adopted pedagogical actions, learning risks, and recommendation and recovery of educational media. The review allowed to present perspectives, identify trends and observe potential research directions, such as behavioral research, collaboration, interaction and performance in the development of teaching-learning activities.

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Why is it important?

The generated data by educational environments, specifically the data generated by the e-learning platforms, are important sources of information for decision support and improvement of the TL. The improvements can be reached from the students’ data analysis through of their behavior, satisfaction, and performance. The objectives are always addressed to the expansion and advancement of the educational horizons, in order to contribute to the evolution of the educational process.

Perspectives