Withdrawal Prediction Framework in Virtual Learning Environment

Abstract

Making the most from virtual learning environments captivates researchers, enhancing the learning experience and reducing the withdrawal rate. In that regard, this article presents a framework for a withdrawal prediction model for the data of the Open University, one of the largest distance-learning institutions. The main contributions of this work cover two main aspects: relational-to-tabular data transformation and data mining for withdrawal prediction. This main steps of the process are: (1) tackling the unbalanced data issue using the SMOTE algorithm; (2) voting over seven different features' selection algorithms; and (3) learning different classifiers for withdrawal prediction. The experimental study demonstrates that the decision trees exhibit better performance in terms of the F-measure value compared to the other tested models. Furthermore, the data balancing and feature selection processes show a crucial role for guiding the predictive model towards a reliable module.