Predicting and improving the academic achievement of university students is a multifactorial problem. Considering the low success rates and high dropout rates, particularly in open education programs characterized by mass enrollment, academic success is an important research area with its causes and consequences. This study aimed to solve a…

Attrition is one of the main concerns in distance learning due to the impact on the incomes and institutions reputation. Timely identification of students at risk has high practical value in effective students' retention services. Big Data mining and machine learning methods are applied to manipulate, analyze and predict students' failure,…

Attrition is one of the main concerns in distance learning due to the impact on the incomes and institutions reputation. Timely identification of students at risk has high practical value in effective students' retention services. Big Data mining and machine learning methods are applied to manipulate, analyze, and predict students' failure,…

The purpose of this paper is to share insights gained from the discovery, design, and delivery phases of creating a three-tiered model of non-academic learning support in open, distance, and flexible learning (ODFL): "Learner Engagement and Success Services (LESS)", at Open Polytechnic | Te Pukenga, New Zealand. Presented as a case…

This article proposes two innovative approaches, the one-channel learning image recognition and the three-channel learning image recognition, to convert student's course involvements into images for early warning predictive analysis. Multiple experiments with 5235 students and 576 absolute/1728 relative input variables were conducted to verify…

The explosion of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in the recent years creates the demand for scalable, automatic approaches to process and evaluate OERs, with the end goal of identifying and recommending the most suitable educational materials for learners. We focus on building models to find the characteristics and features involved in…

Nowadays, the virtual learning environment has become an ideal tool for professional self-development and bringing courses for various learner audiences across the world. There is currently an increasing interest in researching the topic of learner dropout and low completion in distance learning, with one of the main concerns being elevated rates…

In e-learning systems, the tutors play many roles and carry out several tasks that differ from one system to another. The activity of tutoring is influenced by many factors. One factor among them is the assignment of the appropriate profile to the tutor. For this reason, the authors propose a new approach for modeling and evaluating the function…

Schools face enormous challenges regarding how to operate efficiently and safely for the 2020-21 school year. As part of that response, some state leaders are asking the U.S. Department of Education to waive the annual federal testing and accountability requirements for 2021, which are key to understanding and addressing gaps in education among…

The increasing amount of available subjective text data in internet such as product reviews, movie critiques and social media comments provides golden opportunities for information retrieval researchers to extract useful information out of such datasets. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis are two widely researched fields that separately try to…

The 13th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2020) was originally arranged to take place in Ifrane, Morocco. Due to the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) epidemic, EDM 2020, as well as most other academic conferences in 2020, had to be changed to a purely online format. To facilitate efficient transmission of…

This article presents a new approach to online graduate education. With hopes of recruiting a larger cohort in order to preserve a graduate program struggling with low enrollment, we began offering a limited number of seats to students who would attend class in real time but from remote locations, using a videoconferencing platform. Unlike…

This paper brings together some data on student retention in distance education in the form of graduation rates at a sample of distance institutions. The paper suggests that there is a "distance education deficit" with many distance institutions having less than one-quarter of the graduation rates of conventional institutions. It looks…

This paper presents a content analytic approach on doctoral dissertations in the field of distance education in Turkish Higher Education context from the years of 1986 through 2014. A total of 61 dissertations were examined to explore keywords, academic discipline, research areas, theoretical/conceptual frameworks, research designs, research…

Embedded librarians in online courses provide a wealth of service and information to students. Though students indicate that these services are valuable, the librarians providing embedded services frequently note that these projects are very time consuming. This study examines the provision of a less time-intensive model of embedded librarianship…