Learning analytics research has used both knowledge engineering and machine learning methods to model student behaviors within the context of digital learning environments. In this paper, we compare these two approaches, as well as a hybrid approach combining the two types of methods. We illustrate the strengths of each approach in the context of…

Online courses often include discussion forums, which provide a rich source of data to better understand and improve students' learning experiences. However, forum messages frequently contain private information that prevents researchers from analyzing these data. We present a method for discovering and redacting private information including…

The growing use of machine learning for the data-driven study of social issues and the implementation of data-driven decision processes has required researchers to re-examine the often implicit assumption that datadriven models are neutral and free of biases. The careful examination of machine-learned models has identified examples of how existing…