Predictive Analytics: Another Vision of the Learning Process

Teachers are always in need of new tools to support the learning process. Learning analytics has emerged as a solution to provide feedback about the learning progress of students. This solution does not only provide meaningful information to instructors to analyze and improve the learning process, but also to managers and other stakeholders of the learning processes. In this chapter, we extend the vision of learning analytics to predictive analytics. Currently, we are ready to see further in the future and predict the behavior of students based on their actions, and this idea opens a broad potential for educational settings. This chapter discusses challenges, benefits and weaknesses of a predictive system for education. Additionally, the design of a generic predictive system is proposed and experimental results in a real scenario are shown to validate its potential.