Abstract-A learning environment generates massive knowledge by means of the services provided in MOOCs. Such knowledge is produced via learning actor interactions. This result is a motivation for researchers to put forward solutions for big data usage, depending on learning analytics techniques as well as the big data techniques relating to the educational field. In this context, the present article unfolds a uniform model to facilitate the exploitation of the experiences produced by the interactions of the pedagogical actors. The aim of proposing the said model is to make a unified analysis of the massive data generated by learning actors. This model suggests making an initial pre-processing of the massive data produced in an e-learning system, and it's subsequently intends to produce machine learning, defined by rules of measures of actors knowledge relevance. All the processing stages of this model will be introduced in an algorithm that results in the production of learning actor knowledge tree.Keywords-learning analytics, operational data, machine learning, big data analysis, knowledge management
IntroductionCurrently, the field of education is flourishing rapidly throughout the world, due to the changes that have been occurring in this area with the implementation of Massive Open Online Courses MOOCs [1]. Great many research projects have been funded in order to draw the attention of researchers in this field to work on such massive data, conducting in-depth studies of MOOCs (COURSERA, OPEN ODX, etc.).MOOCs generate big data in the form of activity traces. Such data are of three various types, namely: structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. In [2], the author has conducted an in-depth study on the types of data generated by the interactions of educational actors in online learning systems. The structured data are those found in the databases; the semi-structured are those found in the XML and JSON files, whereas the unstructured are those found in documents, video recordings, audio, etc.iJET -Vol. 12, No. 11, 2017 151Big data analysis [3] represents the combination of big data techniques with learning analysis. This combination enables to envision integrating Learning analytics (LA) algorithms with learning systems based on big data. Learning analytics (LA) represent a set of algorithms useful for the analysis and pre-processing of the massive data originally generated in the MOOCs. Indeed, we find two approaches: one supervised and another unsupervised [4,5]. On the other side, big data represent the tendency of actors to store massive data of different natures and to process them in parallel in tune with an architecture [6] built on three key elements: HDSF, MapReduce and YARN.
Research problematicThe massive data generated by the services which are offered within the MOOCs systems are structured, semi-structured and unstructured. Given such fact, prerequisite is to make an in-depth analysis focusing on all the massive data dimensions. To this end, the author in [7] identifies three dimensio...