A survey on educational process mining

TLDR

Educational process mining (EPM) is an emerging field in educational data mining (EDM) that seeks to make unexpressed knowledge explicit and to enhance understanding of the educational process. This paper introduces EPM and discusses its potential applications within the educational domain. EPM uses log data from educational environments to discover, analyze, and visually represent the entire educational process, while also covering related areas such as intentional, sequential pattern, and graph mining, outlining framework components, addressing event‑log challenges, and detailing the data, tools, techniques, models, and application domains employed. Published in WIREs Data Mining Knowledge Discovery 2018 (8:e1230) with DOI 10.1002/widm.1230, the article is categorized under Education and Learning Application Areas.

Abstract

Educational process mining (EPM) is an emerging field in educational data mining (EDM) aiming to make unexpressed knowledge explicit and to facilitate better understanding of the educational process. EPM uses log data gathered specifically from educational environments in order to discover, analyze, and provide a visual representation of the complete educational process. This paper introduces EPM and elaborates on some of the potential of this technology in the educational domain. It also describes some other relevant, related areas such as intentional mining, sequential pattern mining and graph mining. It highlights the components of an EPM framework and it describes the different challenges when handling event logs and other generic issues. It describes the data, tools, techniques and models used in EPM. In addition, the main work in this area is described and grouped by educational application domains. WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov 2018, 8:e1230. doi: 10.1002/widm.1230 This article is categorized under: Application Areas > Business and Industry Application Areas > Education and Learning Application Areas > Government and Public Sector