This course will introduce you to the tools and techniques of predictive models as used by researchers in the fields of learning analytics and educational data mining. It will cover the concepts and techniques that underlie current educational “student success” and “early warning” systems, giving you insight into how learners are categorized as at-risk through automated processes.
You will gain hands-on experience building these kinds of predictive models using the popular (and free) Weka software package. Also, included in this course is a discussion of supervised machine learning techniques, feature selection, model fit, and evaluation of data based on student attributes. Throughout the course, the ethical and administrative considerations of educational predictive models will be addressed.