Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics: An Issue Brief

The authors are grateful for the deliberations of our technical working group (TWG) of academic experts in educational data mining and learning analytics. These experts provided constructive guidance and comments for this issue brief. The TWG comprised Ryan S. In data mining and data analytics, tools and techniques once confined to research laboratories are being adopted by forward-looking industries to generate business intelligence for improving decision making. Higher education institutions are beginning to use analytics for improving the services they provide and for increasing student grades and retention. The U.S. Department of Education's National Education Technology Plan, as one part of its model for 21st-century learning powered by technology, envisions ways of using data from online learning systems to improve instruction. With analytics and data mining experiments in education starting to proliferate, sorting out fact from fiction and identifying research possibilities and practical applications are not easy. This issue brief is intended to help policymakers and administrators understand how analytics and data mining have been—and can be—applied for educational improvement. At present, educational data mining tends to focus on developing new tools for discovering patterns in data. These patterns are generally about the microconcepts involved in learning: one-digit multiplication, subtraction with carries, and so on. Learning analytics—at least as it is currently contrasted with data mining—focuses on applying tools and techniques at larger scales, such as in courses and at schools and postsecondary institutions. But both disciplines work with patterns and prediction: If we can discern the pattern in the data and make sense of what is happening, we can predict what should come next and take the appropriate action. Educational data mining and learning analytics are used to research and build models in several areas that can influence online learning systems. One area is user modeling, which encompasses what a learner knows, what a learner's behavior and motivation are, what the user experience is like, and how satisfied users are with online learning. At the simplest level, analytics can detect when a student in an online course is going astray and nudge him or her on to a course correction. At the most complex, they hold promise of detecting boredom from patterns of key clicks and redirecting the student's attention. Because these data are gathered in real time, there is a real possibility of continuous improvement via multiple feedback loops that operate at different time scales—immediate to the student …