Data Mining in Education Sector

Due to successful applications in the business domain, more and more researchers now interested on applying data mining techniques in the education sector. In this paper, we discuss how data mining can help to improve an education system by enabling better understanding of the students. The extra information can help the teachers to manage their classes better and to provide proactive feedback to the students. Currently we can see two major classes of education systems: traditional face-to-face educational systems and web-based distance educational systems. This paper discusses many successful applications of data mining on both of these educational systems. Each type of system has different objectives and data sources. Hence, the techniques needed and the process to apply a technique can be quite different.