Utilizing Data Mining Techniques to Predict Students Performance using Data Log from MOODLE

Abstract

Due to COVID19 pandemic, most of educational institutions and schools changed the traditional way of teaching to online teaching and learning using well-known Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, etc. Accordingly, LMS started to generate a large data related to students’ characteristics and achievements and other course-related information. This makes it difficult to teachers to monitor students’ behaviour and performance. Therefore, a need to support teachers with a tool alerting student who might be in risk based on their recorded activities and achievements in adopted LMS in the school. This paper focuses on the benefits of using recorded data in LMS platforms, specifically Moodle, to predict students' performance by analysing their behavioural data and engagement activities using data mining techniques. As part of the overall process, this study encountered the task of extracting and selecting relevant data features for predicting performance, along with designing the framework and choosing appropriate machine learning techniques. The collected data underwent pre-processing operations to remove random partitions, empty values, duplicates, and code the data. Different machine learning techniques, including k-NN, TREE, Ensembled Tree, SVM, and MLPNNs were applied to the processed data. The results showed that the MLPNNs technique outperformed other classification techniques, achieving a classification accuracy of 93%, while SVM and k-NN achieved 90% and 87% respectively. This indicates the possibility for future research to investigate incorporating other neural network methods for categorizing students using data from LMS.