Artificial intelligence can identify students at risk of failing and provide tools for success
Artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to improve university education. This is demonstrated by the Learning Intelligent System (LIS) project, which has been developed by researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) with backing from the eLearning Innovation Center. The system was created by a transdisciplinary research team at the UOC and has already produced excellent results over the past year. It shows how an automatic system can be used to help students who are at risk of failing or dropping out to improve their academic performance.
In 2021, a team from the UOC’s Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications published a study in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (ETHE) on the ability of LIS to successfully identify students at risk of failing a course. The team consisted of Ana Elena Guerrero-Roldán and Elena Rodríguez González, from the Technology Enhanced Knowledge and Interaction Group (TEKING) research group, and David Bañeres Besora, from the SOM Research Lab at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3).
The team now aims to use this system to provide academic guidance and reduce dropout rates. This latest study, published in the open-access journal International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL), demonstrates the benefits of an automated nudging system. Not only can it identify at-risk students, but the system itself can provide relevant information to improve the learning process and student performance.
Rodríguez González said, “The software provides guidelines on the importance of planning and setting goals in the learning process and evaluates whether they are being met. It also produces information about the student’s situation throughout the academic year, making it easier for them to make decisions on how to improve. What’s more, it provides notifications about what is happening in the virtual classroom, as well as helping to improve communication between teaching staff and students, which is key to success in online learning environments.”
This nudging system is a very useful tool for teaching staff, as it allows them to be involved more frequently and on the basis of individual teaching needs. “Messages are sent automatically to students, although it is the teaching staff who write these messages and also decide what type of information should be sent, according to the characteristics of their course,” said Rodríguez González. Once these guidelines have been established, the messages are sent depending on the fulfillment of certain conditions related to the student’s performance on the course, their at-risk situation and their behavior in the virtual classroom.
