Abstract:

Educational data mining is a rising field, concerned with developing methods for discovering the descriptive of data that appear as a result of the educational activities in an academic environment. This paper represents a study of a specific Moodle-based application developed at our college for data mining of the different psychomotor part educational activities. The participants are a cohort of users registered in some of the college’s courses. The paper explains complete development for mining e-learning data gradually as well as how to pertain the major data mining techniques used, such as statistics, association rule mining, pattern mining visualization, categorization, clustering and text mining of Moodle data. We have utilized free data mining tools so that it become affordable for any user to start applying data mining without the need for a commercial tool. This system can suggest a great diversity of channels and workspaces to make easy information distribution and communication between participants in the course beside the other known functionality of Moodle such as information sharing, constructing content material, arranging assignments and tests, supervising distance classes and facilitate collaborative learning through forums, chats, file storage space areas, news services. Moreover, the significance of data mining has also given birth to an altogether new concept called ‘Business intelligence data mining’. It means taking out such meaningful data from numerous online podiums on the basis of which critical business decisions could be made.

Keywords:

Data mining, Moodle, collaborative learning.