E-learningDJUST: E-learning dataset from Jordan university of science and technology toward investigating the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on education.

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered different behaviors in education, especially during the lockdown, to contain the virus outbreak in the world. As a result, educational institutions worldwide are currently using online learning platforms to maintain their education presence. This research paper introduces and examines a dataset, E-LearningDJUST, that represents a sample of the student's study progress during the pandemic at Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST). The dataset depicts a sample of the university's students as it includes 9,246 students from 11 faculties taking four courses in spring 2020, summer 2020, and fall 2021 semesters. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first collected dataset that reflects the students' study progress within a Jordanian institute using e-learning system records. One of this work's key findings is observing a high correlation between e-learning events and the final grades out of 100. Thus, the E-LearningDJUST dataset has been experimented with two robust machine learning models (Random Forest and XGBoost) and one simple deep learning model (Feed Forward Neural Network) to predict students' performances. Using RMSE as the primary evaluation criteria, the RMSE values range between 7 and 17. Among the other main findings, the application of feature selection with the random forest leads to better prediction results for all courses as the RMSE difference ranges between (0-0.20). Finally, a comparison study examined students' grades before and after the Coronavirus pandemic to understand how it impacted their grades. A high success rate has been observed during the pandemic compared to what it was before, and this is expected because the exams were online. However, the proportion of students with high marks remained similar to that of pre-pandemic courses.

Predicting students' academic performance using e-learning logs

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) drives most higher education systems in many countries to stop face-to-face learning. Accordingly, many universities, including Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), changed the teaching method from face-to-face education to electronic learning from a distance. This research paper investigated the impact of the e-learning experience on the students during the spring semester of 2020 at JUST. It also explored how to predict students' academic performances using e-learning data. Consequently, we collected students' datasets from two resources: the center for e-learning and open educational resources and the admission and registration unit at the university. Five courses in the spring semester of 2020 were targeted. In addition, four regression machine learning algorithms had been used in this study to generate the predictions: random forest (RF), Bayesian ridge (BR), adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). The results showed that the ensemble model for RF and XGBoost yielded the best performance. Finally, it is worth mentioning that among all the e-learning components and events, quiz events had a significant impact on predicting the student's academic performance. Moreover, the paper shows that the activities between weeks 9 and 12 influenced students' performances during the semester.