A Business Intelligence Framework for Analyzing Educational Data

TLDR

Universities are shifting from teacher‑centric to student‑focused education, yet their extensive data on student socioeconomic and academic variables remain underutilized compared to business intelligence practices. The study aims to enable universities to extract and transform data from multiple information systems into actionable knowledge to improve learning outcomes, inspired by business intelligence successes. The authors propose a business‑intelligence architecture that integrates data‑mining models to identify and classify students based on their information‑system data, demonstrated through a case study.

Abstract

Currently, universities are being forced to change the paradigms of education, where knowledge is mainly based on the experience of the teacher. This change includes the development of quality education focused on students’ learning. These factors have forced universities to look for a solution that allows them to extract data from different information systems and convert them into the knowledge necessary to make decisions that improve learning outcomes. The information systems administered by the universities store a large volume of data on the socioeconomic and academic variables of the students. In the university field, these data are generally not used to generate knowledge about their students, unlike in the business field, where the data are intensively analyzed in business intelligence to gain a competitive advantage. These success stories in the business field can be replicated by universities through an analysis of educational data. This document presents a method that combines models and techniques of data mining within an architecture of business intelligence to make decisions about variables that can influence the development of learning. In order to test the proposed method, a case study is presented, in which students are identified and classified according to the data they generate in the different information systems of a university.