Comment: What are the possibilities and challenges of educational data mining?

"Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an emerging discipline, concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational settings, and using those methods to better understand students, and the settings which they learn in."

(http://edtechreview.in/dictionary/394-what-is-educational-data-mining)

Educational data mining gives educators the opportunity to collect more information on their students than ever before and to find useful patterns and implications from this data. Yehuala, M, references Berry, M.,& Linoff, S. (2000). Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management. New York: Wiley in her paper https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/406d/78fde5a0f81e9fb5fe76edfc325abbfa4615.pdf "Data mining is the extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data. It is about solving problems by analyzing data already present in large quantities of data in order to discover meaningful patterns and rules".

As an educator myself, a particular challenge of data mining is having the knowledge of how to interpret data collected and how to input algorithms to find patterns and rules which can inform my own practice. Through my reading on educational data mining, it appears that this is still a possibility only for educational facilities with the funding and knows how to really interpret the vast quantities of data that they are collecting.

Elbadrawy, A. Rangwala, H. Johri, A. & Karypis, G. (2017, https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~elbad004/sdm2017_tutorial/higher_edm_SDM_2017.pdf) in their paper outlining challenges and opportunities of data mining state that data mining gives educators and institutions the opportunity to, provide customary feedback to learners, adapt the difficulty of exams to meets learners needs and increase the effectiveness of how degrees are planned to be most effective in today's rates of drop-out levels and successes.

Make an Update: Find a piece of research that uses educational data mining as a source of evidence. What kinds of things can educational data mining tell us, or not tell us?

Yehuala, M. in their paper for The International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/406d/78fde5a0f81e9fb5fe76edfc325abbfa4615.pdf) discusses the case of Debre Markos University and their application of data mining techniques for predicting student successes and failures. The university began their research by administering a questionnaire to first-year students which contained 42 questions as well as obtaining their socio-economic background, involvement in studies and their perceptions of the courses they were taking. Based on the results of this questionnaire students were grouped into 5 categories on the basis of their likelihood to succeed or fail.

Through further analysis of the data collected and the outcomes which occurred for the students, the university found that the data mining strategies the implemented did actually offer an accurate prediction for student successes and failures.

"Taking the results of the data mining models for granted, without any evaluation process it could be very risky and lead to wrong decision making." Han,J. & Kamber, M. (2006). Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques( 2nd edition). However, as outlined here by Han, j. & Kamber, M it is important not to take all data as a given. There are always anomalies and in the case of the university case study could a student's predetermined success or failures have negative impacts on their learning experience? Would this encourage lecturers and educators at the university to offer those predetermined to fail more support or to leave them by the wayside? If this information is shared with the students would that motivate them to work harder or to rest on their laurels as they feel it's predetermined they will succeed?

In conclusion, in my opinion, educational data mining allows for analysis of data that was never before possible and could have great benefits on how we better our educational facilities and curriculums and well as our own personal practice. However, it is vital that educators are instructed properly on what this data means and how it can benefit them in order for it to be properly made use of.