The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many areas of the human and organizational ventures worldwide. This includes new innovative technologies and strategies being developed by educators to foster the rapid learning-recovery and reinstatement of the stakeholders (e.g., teachers and students). Indeed, the main challenge for educators has been on what appropriate steps should be taken to prevent learning loss for the students; ranging from how to provide efficient learning tools/curriculum that ensures continuity of learning, to provision of methods that incorporate coping mechanisms and acceleration of education in general. For several higher educational institutions (HEIs), technology-mediated education has become an integral part of the modern teaching/learning instruction amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, when digital technologies have consequently become an inevitable and indispensable part of learning. To this effect, this study defines a hybrid educational model (HyFlex + Tec) used to enable virtual and in-person education in the HEIs. Practically, the study utilized data usage report from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Emotions and Experience Survey questionnaire in a higher education setting for its experiments. To this end, we applied an Exponential Linear trend model and Forecasting method to determine overall progress and statistics for the learners during the Covid-19 pandemic, and subsequently performed a Text Mining and Univariate Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to determine effects and significant differences that the teaching–learning experiences for the teachers and students have on their energy (learning motivation) levels. From the results, we note that the hybrid learning model supports continuity of education/learning for teachers and students during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study also discusses its innovative importance for future monitoring (tracking) of learning experiences and emotional well-being for the stakeholders in leu (aftermath) of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today, modern educational models are concerned with the development of the teacher-student experience and the potential opportunities it presents. User-centric analyses are useful both in terms of the socio-technical perspective on data usage within the educational domain and the positive impact that data-driven methods have. Moreover, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education and process innovation has emerged due to the strategic perspectives and the process monitoring that have shown to be missing within the traditional education curricula. This study shows that there is an unprecedented increase in the amount of text-based data in different activities within the educational processes, which can be leveraged to provide useful strategic intelligence and improvement insights. Educators can apply the resultant methods and technologies, process innovations, and contextual-based information for ample support and monitoring of the teaching-learning processes and decision making. To this effect, this paper proposes an Educational Process and Data Mining (EPDM) model that leverages the perspectives or opinions of the students to provide useful information that can be used to enhance the end-to-end processes within the educational domain. Theoretically, this study applies the model to determine how the students evaluate their teachers by considering the gender of the teachers. We analyzed the underlying patterns and determined the emotional valence of the students based on their comments in the Students Evaluation of Teaching (SET). Thus, this work implements the proposed EPDM model using SET comments captured in a setting of higher education.

Recent trends in educational technology have led to emergence of methods such as teaching analytics (TA) in understanding and management of the teaching–learning processes. Didactically, teaching analytics is one of the promising and emerging methods within the Education domain that have proved to be useful, towards scholastic ways to make use of substantial pieces of evidence drawn from educational data to improve the teaching–learning processes and quality of performance. For this purpose, this study proposed an educational process and data mining plus machine learning (EPDM + ML) model applied to contextually analyze the teachers’ performances and recommendations based on data derived from students’ evaluation of teaching (SET). The EPDM + ML model was designed and implemented based on amalgamation of the Text mining and Machine learning technologies that builds on the descriptive decision theory, which studies the rationality behind decisions the learners are disposed to make based on the textual data quantification and statistical analysis. To this effect, the study determines pedagogical factors that influences the students' recommendations for their teachers, what role the sentiment and emotions expressed by the students in the SET play in the way they evaluate the teachers by taking into account the gender of the teachers. This includes how to automatically predict what a student’s recommendation for the teachers may be based on information about the students’ gender, average sentiment, and emotional valence they have shown in the SET. Practically, we applied the Text mining technique to extract the different sentiments and emotions (intensities of the comments) expressed by the students in the SET, and then utilized the quantified data (average sentiment and emotional valence) to conduct an analysis of covariance and Kruskal Wallis Test to determine the influential factors, as well as, how the students’ recommendation for the teachers differ by considering the gender constructs, respectively. While a large proportion of the comments that we analyzed ( n = 85,378) was classified to be neutral and predominantly interpreted to be positive in nature considering the sentiments (76.4%), and emotional valence (88.2%) expressed by the students. The results of our analysis shows that for the students’ comments which contain some kind of positive or negative sentiment (23.6%) and emotional valence (11.8%); that females students recommended the teachers taking into account the sentiments ( p = .000). While the males appear to be slightly borderline in terms of emotions ( p = .056) and sentiment ( p = .077). Also, the EPDM + ML model showed to be a good predictor and efficient method in determining what the students’ recommendation scores for the teachers would be, going by the high and acceptable values of the precision (1.00), recall (1.00), specificity (1.00), accuracy (1...

Digital technology and literacy can heighten the transformation of teaching and learning in higher education institutions (HEIs). This study uncovers the extent to which digital technologies have been used to advance the teaching and learning process in HEIs, and the barriers and bottlenecks to why it may not have been effectively implemented across the HEIs. The study used nine selected countries in Latin America (LATAM) based on the main focus of the educators, commercial, and financial investors; to show the level of impact/implications of computer technologies on the teaching and learning processes. We applied a two-step (mixed) methodology (through a quantitative and qualitative lens) for the research investigation, using data collected from survey we administered to faculty members in HEIs across the different countries in LATAM. In turn, we implemented a Text Mining technique (sentiment and emotional valence analysis) to analyze opinions (textual data) given by the participants to help determine challenges and obstacles to using the digital technologies for teaching and learning in the region. Quantitatively, we applied a Kruskal–Wallis H-test to analyze the collected multiple choice and ranked items in the questionnaire in order to identify prominent factors that consummately influence the reach, barriers, and bottlenecks, and where the differences may lie across the different LATAM countries. The results show that the users upheld the emphasis on lack of training, infrastructures and resources, access to internet and digital platforms, as the main challenges to the teaching–learning process. The study also empirically discussed and shed light on critical factors the HEIs, particularly in LATAM, should resolve and adopt in support of the decision-making strategies, operational policies and governance, financial investments, and policymaking, at a time when “digital technologies” have become an inevitable and indispensable part of education and learning.

Ontology permits the addition of semantics to process models derived from mining the various data stored in many information systems. The ontological schema enables for automated querying and inference of useful knowledge from the different domain processes. Indeed, such conceptualization methods particularly ontologies for process management which is currently allied to semantic process mining trails to combine process models with ontologies, and are increasingly gaining attention in recent years. In view of that, this chapter introduces an ontology-based mining approach that makes use of concepts within the extracted event logs about domain processes to propose a method which allows for effective querying and improved analysis of the resulting models through semantic labelling (annotation), semantic representation (ontology) and semantic reasoning (reasoner). The proposed method is a semantic-based process mining approach that is able to induce new knowledge based on previously unobserved behaviours, and a more intuitive and easy way to represent and query the datasets and the discovered models compared to other standard logical procedures. To this end, the study claims that it is possible to apply effective reasoning methods to make inferences over a process knowledge-base (e.g. the learning process) that leads to automated discovery of learning patterns and/or behaviour.

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Process mining results can be enhanced by adding semantic knowledge to the derived models. Information discovered due to semantic enrichment of the deployed process models can be used to lift process analysis from syntactic level to a more conceptual level. The work in this paper corroborates that semantic-based process mining is a useful technique towards improving the information value of derived models from the large volume of event logs about any process domain. We use a case study of learning process to illustrate this notion. Our goal is to extract streams of event logs from a learning execution environment and describe formats that allows for mining and improved process analysis of the captured data. The approach involves mapping of the resulting learning model derived from mining event data about a learning process by semantically annotating the process elements with concepts they represent in real time using process descriptions languages, and linking them to an ontology specifically designed for representing learning processes. The semantic analysis allows the meaning of the learning objects to be enhanced through the use of property characteristics and classification of discoverable entities, to generate inference knowledge which are used to determine useful learning patterns by means of the Semantic Learning Process Mining (SLPM) algorithm -technically described as Semantic-Fuzzy Miner. To this end, we show how data from learning processes are being extracted, semantically prepared, and transformed into mining executable formats to enable prediction of individual learning patterns through further semantic analysis of the discovered models.