Mining Sakai to Measure Student Performance: Opportunities and Challenges in Academic Analytics

In this paper we lay out ongoing work on the Open Academic Analytics Initiative (OAAI) 1 , a project aimed at developing, deploying and releasing an open-source environment for academic analytics designed to increase student content mastery, semester-to-semester persistence and degree completion in higher education. .As a result, we expect to see increases in adoption of academic analytics, particularly among institutions using the open-source Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, in both the shortand long-term. The paper provides a preliminary report on how this project intends to address the use of academic data (combining course management system logged data with student records and demographics) to create data mining models that can help predict student performance and take corrective actions. Subject areas: Higher Education, Academic Analytics, Data Mining, Enterprise Systems