Practical work involving laboratory experiments is agreed upon to be an essential component of secondary science education. Practical work encompasses a broad range of activity types. The different forms of practical work are not equal in terms of cognitive demand and learning benefit. Inquiry-based investigations provide experience of cognitive…

Today, the use of software in qualitative research analysis is rapidly becoming widespread among researchers. Researchers manage large data sets using features such as editing data, transcribing, creating codes, and searching within data. However, while the data analysis uses software in a format, the analysis of the essence of the data is done by…

Programming skills (PS) are indispensable abilities in the information age, but the current research on PS cultivation mainly focuses on the teaching methods and lacks the analysis of program features to explore the differences in learners' PS and guide programming learning. Therefore, the purpose of this study aims to explore horizontal…

MOOCs can be considered as a powerful alternative in extraordinary situations where people cannot reach formal education. In recent years, the widespread use of the internet worldwide and especially the COVID-19 has increased the need of people for MOOCs. However, in order to increase the effectiveness of MOOCs, and to provide a better learning…

In a question-answering system, learner generated content including asked and answered questions is a meaningful resource to capture learning interests. This paper proposes an approach based on question topic mining for revealing learners' concerned topics in real community question-answering systems. The authors' approach firstly preprocesses all…

Online fora have become not only one of the most popular communication tools in e-learning environments, but also one of the key factors of the learning process, especially in distance learning, as they can provide to the students involved, motivation for collaboration in order to achieve a common goal. The purpose of this study is to analyse data…

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…

This study examined the prediction of dropouts through data mining approaches in an online program. The subject of the study was selected from a total of 189 students who registered to the online Information Technologies Certificate Program in 2007-2009. The data was collected through online questionnaires (Demographic Survey, Online Technologies…

The advent of information technology has enabled firms to collect significant amounts of data about individuals and mine the data for developing their strategies. Profiling of individuals is one common use of data collected about them. It refers to using known or inferred information to categorize the type of an individual and to tailor specific…

Due to the rapid advances in computing and sensing technologies, enormous amounts of data are being generated everyday in various applications. The integration of data mining and data visualization has been widely used to analyze these massive and complex data sets to discover hidden patterns. For both data mining and visualization to be…

An underlying theme of this paper is that it can be easier and more efficient to conduct valid and effective research studies in online environments than in traditional classrooms. Taking advantage of the "big data" available in an online university, we conducted a study in which a massive online database was used to predict student…

Twelve-year-old Susan took a course designed to improve her reading skills. She read short stories and the teacher would give her and her fellow students a written test every other week measuring vocabulary and reading comprehension. A few days later, Susan's instructor graded the paper and returned her exam. The test showed that she did well on…

An ontology is an effective formal representation of knowledge used commonly in artificial intelligence, semantic web, software engineering, and information retrieval. In open and distance learning, ontologies are used as knowledge bases for e-learning supplements, educational recommenders, and question answering systems that support students with…

"Evidence-centered design" (ECD) is a comprehensive framework for describing the conceptual, computational and inferential elements of educational assessment. It emphasizes the importance of articulating inferences one wants to make and the evidence needed to support those inferences. At first blush, ECD and "educational data…

Excessive college course withdrawals are costly to the student and the institution in terms of time to degree completion, available classroom space, and other resources. Although generally well quantified, detailed analysis of the reasons given by students for course withdrawal is less common. To address this, a text mining analysis was performed…