Latest Articles

mining_framework

Exploring Web Mining

Mining content from the web is becoming an increasingly common activity for individuals and organizations seeking to make informed decisions or simply wanting to collect related information on topics of interest. Web mining is a process of automatically crawling (browsing) websites and scraping (extracting) the relevant content from their pages. This paper presents a literature review of web crawler components and crawl strategies and web scraper components and strategies. A review of current research in web mining approaches is also presented along with a sample listing of publicly available data sources. A discussion on potential security, ethical, and legal issues common to use of web mining tools is also included.

oaai

A Predictive Model for Improving Student Retention

Faculty and advisors need actionable intelligence if they are to be held accountable for student retention. In order for them to effectively make decisions on how to best support at-risk students and choose intervention strategies, they need this intelligence way before the student reaches the point of no return. Lack of collaboration and little to no understanding of the factors that drive retention and influence a student’s at-risk status exacerbate the problem. This paper represents a brief exploration of current pilot programs that are experimenting with the Open Academic Analytics Initiative’s (OAAI) Early Alert System, an open source predictive model-driven decision support system (DSS) designed to provide the actionable intelligence needed to support at-risk students. Initial results indicate a positive and significant impact on course grades and content mastery—primary factors that influence students’ motivation to stay in school.

MLAM

Mobile Learning Acceptance Model

Technology acceptance in education has been and continues to be a central concern for researchers, application and platform developers, and educators. Rapid advancements in miniaturization along with the availability of fast, reliable, and affordable networks have sparked an increasing demand by students for better ways to complement their mobile lifestyles in support of their learning.