Preventing student dropout in distance learning using machine learning techniques

Student dropout occurs quite often in universities providing distance education. The scope of this research is to study whether the usage of machine learning techniques can be useful in dealing with this problem. Subsequently, an attempt was made to identifying the most appropriate learning algorithm for the prediction of students' dropout. A number of experiments have taken place with data provided by the 'informatics' course of the Hellenic Open University and a quite interesting conclusion is that the Naive Bayes algorithm. can be successfully used. A prototype web based support tool, which can automatically recognize students with high probability of dropout, has been constructed by implementing this algorithm.