Feedback on how students progress through completing subgoals can improve students' learning and motivation in programming. Detecting subgoal completion is a challenging task, and most learning environments do so either with "expert-authored" models or with "data-driven" models. Both models have advantages that are…

This work explores how population-based engagement prediction can address cold-start at scale in large learning resource collections. The paper introduces: (1) VLE, a novel dataset that consists of content and video based features extracted from publicly available scientific video lectures coupled with implicit and explicit signals related to…

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…

There is a growing need to empirically evaluate the quality of online instructional interventions at scale. In response, some online learning platforms have begun to implement rapid A/B testing of instructional interventions. In these scenarios, students participate in series of randomized experiments that evaluate problem-level interventions in…

Data mining of course enrollment and course description records has soared as institutions of higher education begin tapping into the value of these data for academic and internal research purposes. This has led to a more than doubling of papers on course prediction tasks every year. The papers often center around a single prediction task and…

We propose an innovative, effective, and data-agnostic method to train a deep-neural network model with an extremely small training dataset, called VELR (Voting-based Ensemble Learning with Rejection). In educational research and practice, providing valid labels for a sufficient amount of data to be used for supervised learning can be very costly…

This paper presents a tool for creating student models in logistic regression. Creating student models has typically been done by expert selection of the appropriate terms, beginning with models as simple as IRT or AFM but more recently with highly complex models like BestLR. While alternative methods exist to select the appropriate predictors for…

We introduce DeepPerfEmb, or DPE, a new deep-learning model that captures dense representations of students' online behaviour and meta-data about students and educational content. The model uses these representations to predict student performance. We evaluate DPE on standard datasets from the literature, showing superior performance to the…

Supervised machine learning has become one of the most important methods for developing educational and intelligent tutoring software; it is the backbone of many educational data mining methods for estimating knowledge, emotion, and other aspects of learning. Hence, in order to ensure optimal utilization of computing resources and effective…

Analyses of student data in post-secondary education should be sensitive to the fact that there are many different topics of study. These different areas will interest different kinds of students, and entail different experiences and learning activities. However, it can be challenging to identify the distinct academic themes that students might…

Educational systems use models of student skill to inform decision-making processes. Defining such models manually is challenging due to the large number of relevant factors. We propose learning multidimensional representations (embeddings) from student activity data -- these are fixed-length real vectors with three desirable characteristics:…

Gathering labeled data in educational data mining (EDM) is a time and cost intensive task. However, the amount of available training data directly influences the quality of predictive models. Unlabeled data, on the other hand, is readily available in high volumes from intelligent tutoring systems and massive open online courses. In this paper, we…

Interactive learning environments facilitate learning by providing hints to fill the gaps in the understanding of a concept. Studies suggest that hints are not used optimally by learners. Either they are used unnecessarily or not used at all. It has been shown that learning outcomes can be improved by providing hints when needed. An effective…

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…

Determining which students are at risk of poorer outcomes -- such as dropping out, failing classes, or decreasing standardized examination scores -- has become an important area of research and practice in both K-12 and higher education. The detectors produced from this type of predictive modeling research are increasingly used in early warning…