Data mining in the e‐learning domain

Higher education (HE) is becoming a big business, with huge investments in IT technology supporting online learning. With the awareness of the knowledge economy has come a growing consciousness that HE constitutes a large industry or economic sector in its own right. In a marketing fashion, we understand that some customers present much greater profit potential than others. But, how will we find those high‐potential customers in a database that contains hundreds of data items for each of millions of customers? Data mining software can help find the “high‐profit” gems buried in mountains of information. However, merely identifying the best prospects is not enough to improve customer value. One must somehow fit the data mining results into the execution of the content management system that enhances the profitability of customer relationships. However, data mining is not yet engaged into e‐learning systems. This paper describes how we can profit from the integration of data mining and the e‐learning technology.