Despite several advantages of online education, lack of effective student-instructor interaction, especially when students need timely help, poses significant pedagogical challenges. Motivated by this, we address the problems of automatically identifying posts that express confusion or urgency from Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) forums. To this…

This study examines the use of data analytics to evaluate students' behaviours during their participation in an online collaborative learning environment called SkyApp. To visualise the learning traits of engagement, emotion and motivation, students' inputs and activity data were captured and quantified for analysis. Experiments were first carried…

The present study operationalizes perceived positive regard in the form of a practical measure that can be applied in distance delivery settings. We collected data by surveying distance students at our university. The questions pertained to the quality of learning and the positive regard of the instructor as perceived by the students. Analytical…

Due to tremendous reception on digital learning platforms, many online users tend to register for online courses in MOOC offered by many prestigious universities all over the world and gain a lot on cutting edge technologies in niche courses. As the reception of online courses is increasing on one side, there have been huge dropouts of…

In Applied AI, or 'machine learning', methods such as neural networks are used to train computers to perform tasks without human intervention. In this article, we question the applicability of these methods to education. In particular, we consider a case of recent attempts from data scientists to add AI elements to a handful of online learning…

This study explores and characterizes learners' participation patterns in MOOC forums, as well as the factors that correlate with learners' participation. Educational data mining and learning analytics methods were used to retrieve and analyze the learners' interpersonal interaction data, which had accumulated in the Coursera log files. The…

The widespread adoption of digital e-learning environments and other learning technology has provided researchers with ready access to large quantities of data. Much of this data comes from discussion forums and has been studied with analytical methods drawn from social network analysis. However, within this large body of research there exists…

We study learning outcome prediction for online courses. Whereas prior work has focused on semester-long courses with frequent student assessments, we focus on short-courses that have single outcomes assigned by instructors at the end. The lack of performance data and generally small enrollments makes the behavior of learners, captured as they…

The premise for this study was that learner interaction in an online web-based course could be assessed in relation to academic performance, or in other words, e-learning. Although some studies reveal that learner interaction with online content is related to student academic performance, it remains unproven whether this is casual, or even if…

This paper provides an account of the topological and its description of contemporary culture and use as a research methodology, a topological lens, generally, and in education research specifically. Some commentary is proffered on the relationships between the topological and the topographical, between relations and locations. A critical account…

This quantitative, correlational study used learning analytics to examine correlations between predictor variables (student-content, student-instructor, and student-system interactions) and criterion variable (student-student interactions) and to determine if the four predictor variables were significant predictors of grades in graduate students…

The purpose of this document is to recommend practices that will help education agencies collect, report, and use attendance data to improve student and school outcomes. This publication substantively revises and expands the information included in "Every School Day Counts: The Forum Guide to Collecting and Using Attendance Data,"…

Lecture videos are amongst the most widely used instructional methods within present Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other digital educational platforms. As the main form of instruction, student engagement behaviour, including interaction with videos, directly impacts the student success or failure and accordingly, in-video dropouts…

Data mining is increasing its popularity in the research of Technology-Enhanced Language Learning and Applied Linguistics in general. It enables a better understanding of progress, performance and possible pitfalls, which would be useful for language learners, teachers and researchers. Until recently it was an unexplored field, but it is expected…

A continued need exists for community college administrators to develop and implement strategies to ensure sufficient staffing to meet demand for online courses and promote student success. The problem this study addressed was threefold. First, online instructors in the local setting are overextended and are consequently unable to implement best…