Abstract:

During the past decade the educational data research is rapidly growing. The use of technology in education has created the need to store and manage large amounts of data that come from various sources and have different formats. Educational data can be used to benefit educational systems and the science of learning. There are two relevant research areas that focus on the use of educational data to support education: Educational Data Mining (EDM) and Learning Analytics (LA). Several studies have been published recently focusing on applications using educational data, revealing that educational data analytics is an evolving science, where researchers have explored the various use cases of applying data mining and analytics techniques on the educational domain. However, there is still a need for exploring the main objectives of applying EDM and LA techniques and defining the specific problems in the educational domain they try to resolve. The aim of this analysis is to identify studies’ objective trends that recent applications are trying to achieve and to identify potential research gaps. The possible correlation between the use of particular types of techniques used by the EDM/LA applications in relation to the goals they are trying to achieve is also being presented. This paper presents the review of EDM and LA empirical studies that have been published between 2016 to 2020. To gain insight into the trend direction of the different projects, the publications are clustered based on the methods applied and the purposes those studies tried to accomplish. Studies that applied more than one technique were assigned to the method groups more than once. This paper will provide an association table of EDM/LA techniques and the objectives for which they have been used, and will serve as a model for other researchers in order to choose the method for their own specific goals. Finally, the goals that recent EDM and LA applications are approaching will be presented, which can be a source of inspiration for further research questions, by providing information on areas of educational goals that remain unexplored or have not received much attention so far.

Keywords:

Edm, La.