Investigating Usage of Resources in LMS with Specific Association Rules

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are widely used to support face to face as well as on-line teaching. In several courses we have observed that students make decreasing use of the resources uploaded for them in the system as the semester progresses. We want to investigate whether a core group of students emerges that keep using the resources or whether, on the contrary, students are eclectic in their choice, consulting resources randomly though they use them less as the semester progresses. This paper introduces specific association rules to investigate this pattern. High confidence of these rules, confirmed by a good rating of other interestingness measures, means that a core group emerges. Support of these rules does not play any role; in fact these rules could be rare.