Studying Academic Indicators within Virtual Learning Environment Using Educational Data Mining

摘要

The rapid developments in information and communication technologies taking place recent years, make iteasy for people to pursue their education distantly. The development of new technologies helped to openspatial and temporal boundaries of learning toward virtual learning, and helped to transform educationprocess from its classical form of courses within classrooms to a new virtual form within virtualenvironments; Consequently, lessons and lectures are delivered using information and communicationtechnologies tools, and student's attendance is virtually performed via Internet. Moreover, the educationprocess in its new form becomes a supervised process, rather than a fully controlled process since virtuallearning changed the education process pattern represented by the triangle (student, teacher and content)by increasing the importance of both “student” and “content” factors and transforming the main task ofthe “teacher” from “Teaching” to “Tutoring”. Consequently, many questions are raised concerningstudents’ performance and concerning the adequacy of virtual learning process. These questions arerelated to the need of accreditation for virtual learning and virtual universities.Our work aims to use Educational Data Mining (EDM) in order to study academic indicators concerning arepresentative sample of students in a virtual learning environment within Syrian Virtual University – SVU(The students who are following Bachelor of Information Technology Diploma –BIT). Our main goal is todiscover the main factors influencing students’ academic trajectory and students’ academic evolutionwithin such environment.Our results indicate strong correlation -in this virtual learning environment- between student average andsome factors like: student’s English level (despite the fact that Arabic language is the teaching language),student’s age, student’s gender, student's over-stay and student’s place of residence (inside /outside Syria).Our results indicate also a need to modify the academic trajectory of students by changing theprerequisites of few courses delivered as a part of BIT diploma like Advanced DBA II, Data Security. Inthis research, the results also highlight the effect of the Syrian Crisis on students. Finally, we've suggestedsome future recommendations based on our observations and results to develop the current informationsystem in SVU in order to help us to deduce some indicators more easily.