Discovering Process in Curriculum Data to Provide Recommendation

Process mining is an emerging technique that can discover the real sequence of various activities from an event log, compare different processes and ultimately find the bottleneck of an existing process and hence improve it. Curriculum data is the history of the courses effectively taken by students. It is essentially process-centric. Applying process mining on curriculum data provides a means to compare cohorts of students, successful and less successful, and presents an opportunity to adjust the requirements for the curriculum by applying enhancement of process mining. This can lead to building recommenders for courses to students based on expected outcome. In this paper we first discover a process model of students taking courses, then, compare the paths that successful and less successful students tend to take and highlight discrepancies between them. The conclusion we reached is that process mining indeed has a great potential to assist teachers and administrators to understand students behavior, to recommend the correct path to students, and at last to enhance the design of a curriculum.