Exploration of student behavior patterns through digital footprints

Abstract

In this experimental work, a set of Data Mining methods were used to reveal student behavior patterns by analyzing their digital footprints in social Web. Data were gathered from open social profiles of students learning at one of the universities in Kazakhstan. For this case study, 25 publications appeared in the students’ social feeds were selected, and students’ digital footprints (namely, information about their likes on these publications) were fixed. Patterns extracted via analysis of these footprints were compared with the results of psychological tests that were carried out before; and finally, the degree to which both these findings corroborated and complemented each other was assessed. Therefore, conducted experiments provided by R ecosystem demonstrated the potential of proposed methods to analyze digital footprints for the sake of educational analytics. Despite the fact that a very small set of data was used, the case study results are quite illustrative.

Keywords

• digital footprints
• data mining
• clustering
• principal components analysis
• r language