Studying Academic Indicators within Virtual Learning Environment Using Educational Data Mining

The rapid developments in information and communication technologies taking place recent years, make it easy for people to pursue their education distantly. The development of new technologies helped to open spatial and temporal boundaries of learning toward virtual learning, and helped to transform education process from its classical form of courses within classrooms to a new virtual form within virtual environments; Consequently, lessons and lectures are delivered using information and communication technologies tools, and student's attendance is virtually performed via Internet. Moreover, the education process in its new form becomes a supervised process, rather than a fully controlled process since virtual learning changed the education process pattern represented by the triangle (student, teacher and content) by increasing the importance of both “student” and “content” factors and transforming the main task of the “teacher” from “Teaching” to “Tutoring”. Consequently, many questions are raised concerning students’ performance and concerning the adequacy of virtual learning process. These questions are related to the need of accreditation for virtual learning and virtual universities. Our work aims to use Educational Data Mining (EDM) in order to study academic indicators concerning a representative sample of students in a virtual learning environment within Syrian Virtual University – SVU (The students who are following Bachelor of Information Technology Diploma –BIT). Our main goal is to discover the main factors influencing students’ academic trajectory and students’ academic evolution within such environment. Our results indicate strong correlation -in this virtual learning environmentbetween student average and some factors like: student’s English level (despite the fact that Arabic language is the teaching language), student’s age, student’s gender, student's over-stay and student’s place of residence (inside /outside Syria). Our results indicate also a need to modify the academic trajectory of students by changing the prerequisites of few courses delivered as a part of BIT diploma like Advanced DBA II, Data Security. In this research, the results also highlight the effect of the Syrian Crisis on students. Finally, we've suggested some future recommendations based on our observations and results to develop the current information system in SVU in order to help us to deduce some indicators more easily.