Learning Analytics Approach with Sakai

As I have discussed in my previous posts the Sakai is an Open Source Learning Management System which is been widely used in academic context for their study programs. Lauria and Joshua [2011] have tried to implement a predictive model within the Sakai for predicting the performance of the students and to take the decisions for making corrective actions. In their research they came up with a methodology which contains six phase on the knowledge discovery process.

 

When collecting the required data they extracted information from diverse sources and followed several pre-processing steps to handle the missing value, outliers and incomplete records. All the data which were logged through Sakai were aggregated to produce consolidated records per course and student. In order to remove the variations in different course contents all the data were collected as ratio values rather than an absolute value.

 

After the data collection process they followed some steps to reduce the dimensionalities on the available data. In order to maintain a proper level of query accuracy and efficiency the number of variables and parameters requiring for the estimation were selected properly and unnecessary features were removed.

 

After the necessary data was selected the transformation and rescaling phase was carried out to make sure that all the attribute data were formatted according to the requirement of the data mining algorithms they used. After the data was converted or transformed the partitioning step was used to divide the data in to several groups. They carried out this partitioning process on the data set to make sure that required amount of data is available for the training of the data model and for the validation with testing step. 

 

For building the data models four different types of data mining approaches were selected. Logistic regression, C5.0 decision tree, support vector machine and Bayesian networks were used for creating the train models with the data set. After the models were created they were validated using the validation data set. For validating the data models they measure the prediction accuracy on the data to verify that the required level of accuracy or the quality can be achieved by the models.

 

Reference :

Eitel J.M. Lauría, Joshua Baron, Mining Sakai to Measure Student Performance: Opportunities and Challenges in Academic Analytics, 2011

Sakai or Moodle ???

As I mentioned in my previous posts the Learning Management Systems (LMS) have started its process as assistant to a much more crucial role in higher education. In most of the organizations, Institutions and Universities currently use many different types of Learning Management Systems to provide their study programs for the students. The growth of the Learning Management Systems are been in a challenge between two categories of commercial or the open source where these two are competing each other for providing better service to the users.

The major open source learning management systems those currently dominating the educational space can be specify as Moodle and Sakai. The major factor behind the demand for this open source LMSs is because of their cost saving and more control.  With the available budgetary constraints people tend to move to open source LMSs due to the fact that any function you find in the commercial tools is available with the open source LMS as well.

As mentioned in the Sakai Project web Site the main objective Sakai is to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment for better higher education. Sakai was initially started by the University of Michigan and Indiana University where both put their efforts to enhance the functionalities. After the grants given by the Mellon Foundation MIT and Stanford joined in and form the Sakai Project.

It is found that in an administrator's perspective, Sakai system is relatively easy to install and setup compared with the many other open source projects in their early stages of development which does not seem to be easy in its installation process. Even the some commercial tool users commented that the Sakai user interface experience very much familiar and easy to manage.

Moodle is a course management system which is a free and Open Source software package designed using sound principles to help educators create effective online learning among the students. It is found that Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 100,000 registered users which are speaking 70 languages in 145 countries. Currently Moodle community has grown in to a much large number where many software developers are contributing enormously for the plug-ins which comes with different functionalities. Even for a single functionality you can find many different plug-ins which are implemented by different developers for various purposes.