Challenges and Opportunities for Educational Data Mining in Pakistan

Abstract

Education provide the skills to lead a healthy, productive and meaningful life to the learners. The beneficial outcomes are directly proportional to the quality of education being received by the students. Pakistan is a developing country and is facing numerous challenges. Limited resources under bad governance and non-consistent policies are more damaging than other issues. Gender discrimination along with social and economic segmentation in the society are also damaging the present weak education system. The cure against these curses, demand full utilization of the available resources and potentials under a systematic advance control and monitoring system for education. Efficient data collection systems are required to cater big fraud like ghost schools in the southern Punjab and interior Sindh. Once authentic data collection is made possible, inferring meaningful knowledge for policies development is achievable with the help of proven developed techniques in the field of Educational Data Mining (EDM). Classification and association, clustering and regression along with decision tree are the most suited techniques to serve the purpose. Understanding importance of EDM techniques, along with how Pakistan's Education system can be benefitted with the implementation of these techniques, is of significant importance for providing Quality Education.