Obtaining knowledge using educational data mining

Abstract

Obtaining knowledge is one of the most important tasks in currently developed systems. Regarding this open problem, educational data mining is one of the areas that gather many efforts. This paper presents a custom methodology of obtaining knowledge about learners. The obtained knowledge is based on activity performed within e-Learning environment. The logged activity regards data about how the student answered to test questions. The main task of the procedure regards clustering students such that different pedagogical approach will be used for each cluster. K-means algorithm has been used as clustering method. The final goal is to create a model of analysis which may conclude whether or not an e-Learning platform is capable of classifying students depending on accumulated knowledge. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.