The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union contains directions on how user data may be collected, stored, and when it must be deleted. As similar legislation is developed around the globe, there is the potential for repercussions across multiple fields of research, including educational data mining (EDM). Over the past two…

Learning analytics research presents challenges for researchers embracing the principles of open science. Protecting student privacy is paramount, but progress in increasing scientific understanding and improving educational outcomes depends upon open, scalable and replicable research. Findings have repeatedly been shown to be contextually…

Predictive analytics methods in education are seeing widespread use and are producing increasingly accurate predictions of students' outcomes. With the increased use of predictive analytics comes increasing concern about fairness for specific subgroups of the population. One approach that has been proposed to increase fairness is using demographic…

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…

Educational technology (EdTech) designers need to ensure population validity as they attempt to meet the individual needs of all students. EdTech researchers often have access to larger and more diverse samples of student data to test replication across broad demographic contexts as compared to either the small-scale experiments or the larger…