Data mining to support tutoring in virtual learning communities: experiences and challenges

Computers and Internet are becoming widely used in educational contexts. Particularly, the wide availability of Learning Management Systems (LMS) allows to easily set up virtual communities providing channels and workspaces to facilitate communication and information sharing. Most of these systems are able to track students interaction within the workspaces and store it in a database that can be later analyzed to assess student behavior. In this chapter we review some experiences using data mining to analyze data obtained from e-learning courses based upon virtual communities. We illustrate several issues that arise in this task providing real world examples and applications and discuss the challenges that must be addressed in order to integrate data mining technologies in LMS