A Knowledge-Driven Educational Decision Support System

Abstract

Education always plays an important role in building up every country around the world. Hence, educational decision making support is significant to students, educators, and educational organizations. The support will be more valuable if a lot of relevant data and knowledge mined from data are available for educational managers in their decision making process. Nevertheless, educational decision support system development is non-trivial and different from organization to organization due to the peculiar features of each educational organization. Besides, an academic credit system is nowadays very widely-used in many educational organizations. Due to the flexibility of a credit system of education, applying data mining techniques to educational data for knowledge discovery is challenging. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-driven educational decision support system for education with a semester credit system by taking advantage of educational data mining. During system development, we have figured out that knowledge discovery from educational data in a semester credit system is full of many problems remaining unsolved with a semester credit system. Tackling those problems, our resulting system can provide educational managers with actionable knowledge discovered from educational data. Such knowledge-driven decision support is helpful for educational managers to make more appropriate and reasonable decisions about student’s study and further give support to students for their graduation. Above all, a waste of effort, time, and money can be avoided accordingly for both students and educators. Keywords-educational decision support system; knowledgedriven decision support system; data-driven decision support system; educational data mining; actionable knowledge