Web Intelligence in Higher Education: A Study on the Usage of Business Intelligence Techniques in Education

The usage of web intelligence systems in Education has been growing in the last years. The large amount of papers, dissertations and articles about this topic, created in the last decade, is a proof of the investment in the research of this theme. This paper has the main purpose of obtaining a better comprehension of the benefits and the disadvantages of implementing this type of systems to improve the way that we learn and teach. With this main goal in mind and considering that a simple analysis of a normalized database is not sufficient, a Web Intelligent System (WIS) was designed. This type of implementation allows the evaluation of large amounts of data (in this case related to Education), with a lot of incoherences, most of the time, which could be more easily analyzed with the help of the tools, supplied by these systems. This study was conducted with a sample of more than 133 students, that attended the course of Web Programming, in MiEGSI (master's degree in Information Systems) in University of Minho. With the WIS, it was possible to understand the main reasons that lead to success or retention in education, if this type of implementation was well accepted and used by the students, along with other important aspects, which can be verified by the results obtained. The application was accessed 21349 times, which means, in average, every student accessed it 143 times. The rate of retention is 10.5 % which corresponds to a total of 14 students that did not achieve success within the course. In average 25 students did not attend the classes, which links to the principal cause of retention.