In the literature related to higher education, the concept of dropout has been approached from several perspectives and, over the years, its definition has been influenced by the use of diversified semantic interpretations. In a general higher education environment dropout can be broadly characterized as the act of a student engaged in a course…

Researchers have spent years understanding resource utilization to improve scheduling, load balancing, and system management through short-term prediction of resource utilization. Early research focused primarily on single operating systems; later, interest shifted to distributed systems and, finally, into web services. In each case researchers…

Educational data mining is an emerging research field concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational context. These data allow the educational stakeholders to discover new, interesting and valuable knowledge about students. In this paper, we present a new user-friendly decision support tool for…

The granting of credit is a necessary risk of doing business. If companies only accepted cash, sales would be negatively impacted. In a perfect world, all consumers would pay their bills when they become due. However, the fact is that some consumers do default on debt. Companies are willing to accept default risk because the value of defaults does…

This paper proposes a generic methodology and architecture for developing a novel conversational intelligent tutoring system (CITS) called Oscar that leads a tutoring conversation and dynamically predicts and adapts to a student's learning style. Oscar aims to mimic a human tutor by implicitly modelling the learning style during tutoring, and…

The interactions that students have with each other, with the instructors, and with educational resources are valuable indicators of the effectiveness of a learning experience. The increasing use of information and communication technology allows these interactions to be recorded so that analytic or mining techniques are used to gain a deeper…

Success in an online learning environment is tied to both human and system factors. This study illuminates the unique contributions of human factors (comfort with online learning, self-management of learning, and perceived Web self-efficacy) to online learning system success, which is measured in terms of usage and satisfaction. The research model…

The size and dynamism of the Web poses challenges for all its stakeholders, which include producers/consumers of content, and advertisers who want to place advertisements next to relevant content. A critical piece of information for the stakeholders is the demographics of the consumers who are likely to visit a given web site. However, predicting…

In the wake of the information explosion and rapidly progressing technology [Mayer, R. E. (2001). "Multimedia learning". Cambridge: University Press] formulated a theory that focused on human cognition, rather than technology capacity and features. By measuring the effect of cognitive individual differences and display design manipulations on…

This study proposes a new method named the IIS-map-based method for analyzing interactions in face-to-face collaborative learning settings. This analysis method is conducted in three steps: firstly, drawing an initial IIS-map according to collaborative tasks; secondly, coding and segmenting information flows into information items of IIS; thirdly,…

The need to educate a competitive workforce is a global problem. In the US, for example, despite billions of dollars spent to improve the educational system, approximately 35% of students never finish high school. The drop rate among some demographic groups is as high as 50-60%. At the college level in the US only 30% of students graduate from…

Community colleges continue to experience growth in online courses. This growth reflects the need to increase the numbers of students who complete certificates or degrees. Retaining online students, not to mention assuring their success, is a challenge that must be addressed through practical institutional responses. By leveraging existing student…

Building computerized mechanisms that will accurately, immediately and continually recognize a learner's affective state and activate an appropriate response based on integrated pedagogical models is becoming one of the main aims of artificial intelligence in education. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the various kinds of evidence…

This study investigated an innovative approach of program evaluation through analyses of student learning logs, demographic data, and end-of-course evaluation surveys in an online K-12 supplemental program. The results support the development of a program evaluation model for decision making on teaching and learning at the K-12 level. A case study…

The ability to apply existing knowledge in new situations and settings is clearly a vital skill that all students need to develop. Nowhere is this truer than in the rapidly developing world of Web-based learning, which is characterized by non-sequential courses and the absence of an effective cross-subject guidance system. As a result, questions…