With the widespread use of learning analytics (LA), ethical concerns about fairness have been raised. Research shows that LA models may be biased against students of certain demographic subgroups. Although fairness has gained significant attention in the broader machine learning (ML) community in the last decade, it is only recently that attention…

This article offers a case study of how platforms and predictive infrastructures are emerging in higher education. It examines a Learning Analytics Application Programming Interface (API) from a popular Learning Management System. The API is treated firstly as an artefact based on the computational abstraction of educational principles, and…

Many universities have, or are facing, the task of providing high quality essential customer services with fewer financial and human resources. The growing diversity of students, their needs and proficiencies, along with the increasing variety of university program offerings, make providing customized, ondemand, automated solutions crucial to…

Background: Small private online courses (SPOCs) are one of the strategies to introduce the massive open online courses (MOOCs) within the university environment and to have these courses validates for academic credit. However, numerous researchers have highlighted that academic dishonesty is greatly facilitated by the online context in which…

Big data is an important part of innovation that has recently attracted a lot of interest from academics and practitioners alike. Given the importance of the education industry, there is a growing trend to investigate the role of big data in this field. Much research has been undertaken to date in order to better understand the use of big data in…

Academic advising plays an important role in students' decision-making in higher education. Data-driven methods provide useful recommendations to students to help them with degree completion. Several course recommendation models have been proposed in the literature to recommend courses for the next semester. One aspect of the data that has yet to…

A significant amount of research has gone into predicting student performance and many studies have been conducted to predict why students drop out. A variety of data including digital footprints, socio-economic data, financial data, and psychological aspects have been used to predict student performance at the test, course, or program level.…

Classifying educational forum posts is a longstanding task in the research of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. Though this task has been tackled by applying both traditional Machine Learning (ML) approaches (e.g., Logistics Regression and Random Forest) and up-to-date Deep Learning (DL) approaches, there lacks a systematic…