Web mining for distance education

Application of data mining techniques to the WWW (World Wide Web), referred to as Web mining, has been the focus of several research projects and papers. One of several possibilities can be its application to distance education. Taken as a whole, the emerging trends in distance education are facilitating its usability on the Internet. With the explosive growth of information sources available on the WWW, Web mining has become suitable for keeping pace with the trends in education, such as mass customization. In this paper, we define Web mining and present an overview of distance education. We describe the possibilities of application of Web mining to distance education, and, consequently, show that the use of Web mining for educational purposes is of great interest.