CurriM : Curriculum Mining

1. CurriM: Curriculum Mining MykolaPechenizkiy TU Eindhoven Learning Analytics Innovation 10 October 2012 SURFfoundation, Utrecht, the Netherlands

2. Initial Motivation for CurriM • Current practice: • We thinkwe know what our curriculum is and how the students study. But is this true? • CurriM aims at providing tools to analyze • how the students actually study • Who would benefit from our tool? • Directors of education, study advisers, students • Goal: showcase the potential and feasibility • Data mining and process mining techniques • 10 years of TUE administrative data; exam grades CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

3. Questions for CurriM to Answer • What is the realacademic curriculum (study program)? • How do students reallystudy? • Is there a typical (or the best) way to study? • Do current prerequisites make sense? • Is the particular curriculum constraint obeyed? • How likely is it that a student will finish the studies successfully or will drop out? • What is my expected time to finish? • Should I now take courses A & B & C or C & D? CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

4. Refocused to Target Students as Users (based on the received feedback) Awareness tool supporting interactive querying: • How does a course relate to the program? • Prerequisites, follow up dependencies • How am I doing wrt the averages, top 10%? • Aggregates/OLAP • What is my expected time to finish? • Predictive modeling • Should I now take courses A & B & C or C & D? • Collaborative filtering style recommendations CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

5. CurriM UI Demo CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

6. Where is EDM/LA? • (hidden from the users behind GUI) Curriculum model: • Codified constraintswith Colored Petri net and LTL • Prerequisites, follow up dependencies, 3 out of 5 selection, number of attempts, mandatory courses etc. • Input: domain knowledge and output of patters mining • Awareness and automated conformance checking • Is the currently chosen path compliant with the official guidelines and follows data driven recommendations • Computed aggregates and mined pattern from the data • Data driven recommendations and predictions • What is my expected time to finish? • Should I take now courses A & B & C or C & D? CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

7. Main Results • Software prototype – CurriM as ProM plugin, • Focus on GUI + architecture/interfaces • Demonstrates the concept • Experiments with TUE dataset • Prerequisites, bottleneck/predictive courses • Recommendations • Data quality is the key • Clear motivation and need for a continuation • The concept is found to be promising • Potential and feasibility is shown • Roadmap CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

8. Why Do Students Like the Concept? CurriM is a tool that • Provides orientation: – Curriculum as a guide and motivation • See the connections and dependencies • Provides awareness and recommendations • Global: how good is their personal education route, where they currently are, where they are heading,how well they do in comparison with others • Local: what would it mean to take course X • Enables better planning and regular monitoring • Focus on what looks important, not just interesting CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

9. Main Lessons Learnt Data quality is the key Administrative DBs and existing data collection organization do not keep EDM/LA in mind Lots of preprocessing and reorganization is required Meta-data is the other key (lacking codifiability) Everything that is scattered in study guides and minds of study advisors should become easy to codify Curriculum changes more often than we tend to think Semesters-trimesters-quartiles, courses & course ids Being “flexible” (written vs. unwritten rules) too much Effectively means no formal curriculum CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

10. Conclusions • CurriM can become a big success • The students seem to like the idea • It is promising and it is feasible; but it is a long way from the current concept to a fully functional and usable tool • Surf funding opportunity in LA was nice • Triggered us to take concrete practical steps, a tool rather than techniques development; • But a more serious commitment is needed to make a real breakthrough and bring CurriM into the educational practice CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

11. Continuation Roadmap • Conditioned wrt funding opportunities • Working out the full cycle of the information flows including pattern mining, predictions and recommendations, and its integration/parallelization with the administrative processes • Working out different views and functionality for students vs. educators, HCI/usability aspects • Improve data quality collection • Facilitate knowledge base construction (meta-data, mappings) • Facilitate curriculum formalization for faculties (tooling) CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

12. Project Team Project leader: dr. Mykola Pechenizkiy – educational data mining expert Driving force: Pedro Toledo – software developer, applied researcher Technology experts: Prof. dr. Paul De Bra – Human-computer interaction and databases expert dr. ToonCalders – pattern mining expert, assistant professor dr. Nikola Trcka – collaborator on curriculum mining, postdoc dr. Boudewijn van Dongen – processmining expert, assistant professor dr. Eric Verbeek – ProM software expert, scientific programmer Domain experts Several domain experts, i.e. responsible educators, are available for CurriM on request: dr. Karen Ali (STU), Prof. dr. Mark de Berg (CSE) CurriM: Curriculum Mining Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

13. Additional slides Including some from the original proposal CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

14. Execution plan Task 1. Developing the first software prototype for academic curriculum modeling. As mini R&D cycles: • identifying types of curriculum specific patterns we need to mine from the event logs (in collaboration with the domain experts) and to include in the curriculum modeling and developing corresponding pattern mining and pattern assembling techniques; • Implementing techniques and integrating it with ProM that provides an important process mining foundation framework and many of the building blocks for curriculum modeling software; • testing a particular piece of software. CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

15. Execution plan Task 2. Case study: modeling the curriculum of the Department of Computer Science, TUE; Goals: Validating the correctness and usefulness (to the end users, i.e. teachers, study advisers, students) of the developed curriculum mining techniques and their implementations. Developing guidelines for managing the curriculum related data to avoid the problems we will encounter or envision during the case study. Task 1 and Task 2 will run simultaneously ensuring timely feedback. CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

16. Execution plan Task 3. Creating a roadmap for further study and development of the curriculum modeling toolset • Develop R&D agenda for the coming years. • This includes identification of not only research challenges i.e. answering the question • “what kind of new data mining and process mining techniques are needed to address the peculiarities of the curriculum mining domain?” • but also the strategy of the smooth technology transfer to the prospective end users, i.e. • early adopters (e.g. TUE or 3TU departments) that would help to validate the usability and usefulness of the curriculum mining software “in the wild”. CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

17. Project Team Task 3. Creating a roadmap for further study and development of the curriculum modeling toolset • Develop R&D agenda for the coming years. • This includes identification of not only research challenges i.e. answering the question • “what kind of new data mining and process mining techniques are needed to address the peculiarities of the curriculum mining domain?” • but also the strategy of the smooth technology transfer to the prospective end users, i.e. • early adopters (e.g. TUE or 3TU departments) that would help to validate the usability and usefulness of the curriculum mining software “in the wild”. CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

18. Educational Data Mining & Learning Analytics for All: Potential, Dangers, Challenges Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

19. Educational Process Mining Toolbox CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

20. Intuition suggests that curriculum is • Structured and easy to understand as we think there are not that many options to choose from • It may look just like this one: • but the data may suggest that it looks different… CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

21. … data may suggest that students show somewhat more diverse behaviour: CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

22. Two Different Tasks • Isolate a set of standard curriculum patterns and based on these patterns • mine the curriculum as an executable quantified formal model and analyze it, or • first (manually) devise a formal model of the assumed curriculum and test it against the data. Event Log - MXML format supported by ProM Typical forms of requirements in the curriculum Colored Petri net CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

23. Student Timestamp Events A S1 2, 3, 5 A S2 6, 1 A S3 1 B S1 4, 5, 6 B S3 2 B S4 7, 8, 1, 2 B S5 1, 6 C S1 1, 8, 7 Application Scenarios • Scenario 1: Find most common types of behavior (and cluster them) • Scenario 2: Find emerging patterns: such patterns, which capture significant • differences in behavior of students who graduated vs. those students who did not • changes in behaviour of students from year 2006-07 to 2007-08. • in both cases we search for such patters which supports increase significantly from one dataset to another (i.e. in space in the first case and in time in the second case) • Scenario 3: After finding a bottleneck, find frequent patterns that describe it, i.e. for which students it is the bottleneck and why CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

24. Example 2-out-of-3 Pattern Check At least 2 courses from { 2Y420,2F725,2IH20 } must be taken before graduation : An higher level abstraction can be developed on a longer run to avoid we aim at developing a CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

25. Process Discovery Example CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

26. Which Courses Are Difficult/Easy for Which Students? CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

27. References Trčka, N., Pechenizkiy, M. & van der Aalst, W. (2010) "Process Mining from Educational Data (Chapter 9)", In Handbook of Educational Data Mining. , pp. 123-142. London: CRC Press. Pechenizkiy, M., Trčka, N., Vasilyeva, E., van der Aalst, W. & De Bra, P. (2009) Process Mining Online Assessment Data, In Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM'09), pp. 279-288. Trčka, N. & Pechenizkiy, M. (2009) From Local Patterns to Global Models: Towards Domain Driven Educational Process Mining, In Proceedings of Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA'09), pp. 1114-1119. Bose, R.P.J.C., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Zliobaite, I. & Pechenizkiy, M. (2011) Handling Concept Drift in Process Mining, In Proceedings of 23rd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering CAiSE'2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6741, Springer, pp. 391-405. Dekker, G., Pechenizkiy, M. & Vleeshouwers, J. (2009) Predicting Students Drop Out: a Case Study, In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM'09), pp. 41-50. http://www.processmining.org/ CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology

28. Short CV of the Project Leader Mykola Pechenizkiy Assistant Professorat Dept. of Computer Science, TU/e Research interests: data mining and knowledge discovery; Particularly predictive analytics for information systems serving industry, commerse, medicine and education. http://www.win.tue.nl/~mpechen/- projects, pubs, talks etc. Major recent EDM-related activities:

29. Confirmed interest in CurriM at TUE Dr. Karen S. Ali - Director of Education and Student Service Center, STU Prof. Dr. Mark de Berg - Director of the graduate program, Dept. of Computer Science Dr. Marloes van Lierop - Director of the bachelor program, Dept. of Computer Science Study advisers at different faculties CurriM: Curriculum Mining Project Proposal Mykola Pechenizkiy, Eindhoven University of Technology