ABSTRACT
University electronic learning (e-learning) has witnessed phenomenal growth, especially in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This type of education is significant because it ensures that all students receive the required learning. The statistical evaluations are limited in providing good predictions of the university’s e-learning quality. That is forcing many universities to go to online and blended learning environments. This paper presents an approach of statistical analysis to identify the most common factors that affect the students’ performance and then use artificial neural networks (ANNs) to predict students’ performance within the blended learning environment of Saudi Electronic University (SEU). Accordingly, this dissertation generated a dataset from SEU’s Blackboard learning management system. The student’s performance can be tested using a set of factors: the studying (face-to-face or virtual), percentage of attending live lectures, midterm exam scores, and percentage of solved assessments. The results showed that the four factors are responsible for academic performance. After that, we proposed a new ANN model to predict the students’ performance depending on the four factors. Firefly Algorithm (FFA) was used for training the ANNs. The proposed model’s performance will be evaluated through different statistical tests, such as error functions, statistical hypothesis tests, and ANOVA tests. © 2022 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
As a consequence of sudden outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, educational institutes around the globe are forced to switch from traditional learning systems to e-learning systems. This has led to a variety of technology-driven pedagogies in e-teaching as well as e-learning. In order to take the best advantage, an appropriate understanding of the cognitive capability is of prime importance. This paper presents an intelligent cognitive maturity recognition system for confidence-based e-learning. We gather the data from actual test environment by involving a number of students and academicians to act as experts. Then a Genetic Programming based simulation and modeling is applied to generate a generalized classifier in the form of a mathematical expression. The simulation is derived towards an optimal space by carefully designed fitness function and assigning a range to each of the class labels. Experimental results validate that the proposed method yields comparative and superior results which makes it feasible to be used in real world scenarios.