This case study examines employee attrition, its detrimental effects on businesses, and the potential of data analytics to address this challenge. By employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a sophisticated NLP technique, we delve into the underlying reasons for employee departures. Additionally, we explore using RapidMiner to develop…

Background: High-quality feedback is crucial for academic success, driving student motivation and engagement while research explores effective delivery and student interactions. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly natural language processing (NLP), offer innovative methods for analyzing complex qualitative data such as feedback…

Constructing a consensus problem space from extensive qualitative data for an ill-structured real-life problem and expressing the result to a broader audience is challenging. To effectively communicate a complex problem space, visualization of that problem space must elucidate inter-causal relationships among the problem variables. In this…

A model that maps the requisite skills, or knowledge components, to the contents of an online course is necessary to implement many adaptive learning technologies. However, developing a skill model and tagging courseware contents with individual skills can be expensive and error prone. We propose a technology to automatically identify latent…

Encouraging teachers to reflect on their instructional practices and course design has been shown to be an effective means of improving instruction and student learning. However, the process of encouraging reflection is difficult; reflection requires quality data, thoughtful analysis, and contextualized interpretation. Because of this, research on…

Surveys have long been used in physics education research to understand student reasoning and inform course improvements. However, to make analysis of large sets of responses practical, most surveys use a closed-response format with a small set of potential responses. Open-ended formats, such as written free response, can provide deeper insights…

Feedback is an essential part of the educational assessment that improves student learning. As education changes with the advancement of technology, educational assessment has also adapted to the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Despite the increasing use of online assessments during the last decade, a limited number of studies have…

The University of Palermo is proud to host the 18th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) in Palermo, Italy, from July 20 to July 23, 2025. EDM is the annual flagship conference of the International Educational Data Mining Society. This year's theme is "New Goals, New Measurements, New Incentives to Learn." The theme…

We propose a novel model, Wide & Deep Item Response Theory (Wide & Deep IRT), to predict the correctness of students' responses to questions using historical clickstream data. This model combines the strengths of conventional Item Response Theory (IRT) models and Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systems. By leveraging clickstream…

Students who take an online course, such as a MOOC, use the course's discussion forum to ask questions or reach out to instructors when encountering an issue. However, reading and responding to students' questions is difficult to scale because of the time needed to consider each message. As a result, critical issues may be left unresolved, and…

Sentiment Analysis is a field of Natural Language Processing which aims at classifying the author's sentiment in text. This paper first describes a sentiment analysis model for students' comments about professor performance. The model achieved impressive results for comments collected from student surveys conducted at a private university in…

This paper provides an alternative way of document representation by treating topic probabilities as a vector representation for words and representing a document as a combination of the word vectors. A comparison on summary data shows that this representation is more effective in document classification. [This paper was published in:…

Gunawardena et al.'s (1997) Interaction Analysis Model (IAM) is one of the most frequently employed frameworks to guide the qualitative analysis of social construction of knowledge online. However, qualitative analysis is time consuming, and precludes immediate feedback to revise online courses while being delivered. To expedite analysis with a…

Archived transcripts from tens of millions of online human tutoring sessions potentially contain important knowledge about how online tutors help, or fail to help, students learn. However, without ways of automatically analyzing these large corpora, any knowledge in this data will remain buried. One way to approach this issue is to train an…

Sharing user information between systems is an area of interest for every field involving personalization. Recommender Systems are more advanced in this aspect than Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and Intelligent Learning Environments (ILEs). A reason for this is that the user models of Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Intelligent Learning…