Using Educational Data Mining Methods to Study the Impact of Virtual Classroom in E-Learning

In the past few years, Iranian universities have embarked to use e-learning tools and technologies to extend and improve their educational services. After a few years of conducting e-learning programs a debate took place within the executives and managers of the e-learning institutes concerning which activities are of the most influence on the learning progress of online students. This research is aimed to investigate the impact of a number of e-learning activities on the students’ learning development. The results show that participation in virtual classroom sessions has the most substantial impact on the students’ final grades. This paper presents the process of applying data mining methods to the web usage records of students’ activities in a virtual learning environment. The main idea is to rank the learning activities based on their importance in order to improve students’ performance by focusing on the most important ones.