Let's shine together!: a comparative study between learning analytics and educational data mining

Abstract

Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) and Educational Data Mining (EDM) are two of the most popular venues for researchers and practitioners to report and disseminate discoveries in data-intensive research on technology-enhanced education. After the development of about a decade, it is time to scrutinize and compare these two venues. By doing this, we expected to inform relevant stakeholders of a better understanding of the past development of LAK and EDM and provide suggestions for their future development. Specifically, we conducted an extensive comparison analysis between LAK and EDM from four perspectives, including (i) the topics investigated; (ii) community development; (iii) community diversity; and (iv) research impact. Furthermore, we applied one of the most widely-used language modeling techniques (Word2Vec) to capture words used frequently by researchers to describe future works that can be pursued by building upon suggestions made in the published papers to shed light on potential directions for future research.