Integrating web usage mining for an automatic learner profile detection: A learning styles-based approach

With the technological revolution of Internet and the information overload, adaptive E-learning has become the promising solution for educational institutions since it enhances students' learning process according to many factors such as their learning styles. Learning styles are a criteria of great import in E-learning environment because they can help the system to effectively personalize students' learning process. Generally, the traditional way of detecting students' learning style is based on asking students to fill out a questionnaire. However, using this static technique presents many problems. Some of these problems include the lack of self-awareness of students of their learning preferences. In addition, almost all students are bored when they are asked to fill out a questionnaire. Thus, in this work, we present an automatic approach for detecting students' learning style based on web usage mining. It consists in classifying students' log files according to a specific learning style model (Felder and Silverman model) using clustering algorithms (K-means algorithm). In order to test the efficiency of our work, we use a real-world dataset gathered from an E-learning system. Experimental results show that our approach provide promising results.