Student cluster analysis based on Moodle data and
academic performance indicators
Marian Bucos
Communications Department
Politehnica University Timișoara
Timișoara, România
marian.bucos@upt.ro
Abstract—The present work considers the possibility of
using Moodle course logs and student performance indicators
within the Database Systems course to apply the K-Means
clustering algorithm. Clusters of students are identified and
explained to partition students with similar study behaviours
and performance. Moreover, the understanding of the five
groups emerged in cluster analysis allowed us to identify a
cluster that contains 86% of students at risk of not completing
the course activity. One important aspect that differentiates our
study from other similar works is the use of data collected over
a long period of time, from 2015 to 2019. The final data set,
obtained after preprocessing, contains no less than 185.206
course logs.
Keywords—student clusters, clustering analysis, Moodle data,
student performance, educational data mining
I. INTRODUCTION
Higher education institutions are responsible for providing
students with learning scenarios for developing technical
skills and to certify that those skills are acquired by the
students. At the same time, due to economic criteria, the
number of students per teacher rate is increasing. This leads to
a harder job for the educators to identify the students at risk of
failure that could be helped. One solution is to take advantage
of the data collected by educational platforms that become
ubiquitous in the past decade.
Knowledge discovery from data is the scope of the Data
Mining research field. The main function is the application of
specific methods to develop models that can detect previously
unknown patterns [1]. Applying Data Mining methods for
analyzing educational data defines the field of Educational
Data Mining (EDM). According to Baker and Yacef, the most
used approaches in EDM are classification, clustering,
relationship mining, and pattern discovery [2]. On the other
hand, the authors argued that one of the areas that most often
attracts attention in EDM research is identifying factors that
are associated with student failure.
As mentioned above a popular data mining technique is
the use of clustering algorithms to predict students at risk or
to identify the predictors of this outcome. Bharara et al. in [3]
used the K-Means clustering method to identify meaningful
indicators and to study the relationships between these
metrics, analyzing the effects on student’s performance.
Evaluating the clusters produced the authors reported that the
parental involvement features and learning platform
interactional features vary with demographic features and
affect students’ learning behaviour and overall performance.
In another study, the authors proposed clustering students
by mining Moodle log with the first objective to define
relevant clustering features [4]. They used three courses with
a low number of students (15, 30, and 56) and compared the
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Bogdan Drăgulescu
Communications Department
Politehnica University Timișoara
Timișoara, România
bogdan.dragulescu@upt.ro
results of four clustering algorithms: X-means, K-Means,
Hierarchical, and Expectation Maximization. A low number
of clusters were produced (2 or 3 depending on the course and
algorithm), and the authors did not observe groups that had an
obvious behaviour difference. They explain this phenomenon
by the small number of students and homogenous groups in
terms of age, tech use and former experience.
Pradana et al. in [5] used multiple clustering algorithms
(K-Means, Hierarchical, and Louvain) to see the most
appropriate clustering technique in analyzing Moodle log
activity data. They focused on four different Moodle courses,
in a five months period. Certain actions extracted for the
events in the Moodle logs were used in the clustering process.
The results revealed that the Louvain algorithm can divide
more evenly and precisely compared to K-Means and
Hierarchical cluster techniques.
Other approaches propose using clustering to improve the
performance of predicting students at risk in tandem with
classification algorithms. Such examples are: a hybrid
algorithm that shows a strong relationship between student
behaviour and their academic performance [6], using Decision
Trees classifier and K-Means clustering to predict student’s
GPA [7], using K-Means clustering and classification
methods to predict course achievements for students through
their procrastination behaviour [8].
In the above-mentioned studies, some shortcomings can
be identified: small datasets, mixed data from multiple
courses, not all studies evaluate the resulting clusters, the
number of clusters may be too small for some use cases.
Hence, our research question for this student clustering study
is as follows: What student clusters emerge in the Database
Systems course based on browsing history events logged in
Moodle platform and performance activity grades? In addition
to identifying clusters and understanding their specificity, the
present work continues our previous research, which aims to
identify students at risk of failing activities or courses [9] [10].
This article deals with the problem of identification of
Moodle course student groups using cluster analysis. This
paper is organized as follows. The next section describes the
method of the research, including data collection and data
preprocessing, and the clustering algorithm used. Section 3
presents the experiment carried out and the results of the
student clustering study. Section 4 discusses the outcomes of
this work. Section 5 presents the conclusions and offers
insights for further research.
II. METHODOLOGY
As mentioned earlier, the objective of this paper is to
identify different clusters of students in the Database Systems
course at the Politehnica University Timișoara. The general
process we will follow when developing this clustering model
can be resumed as follows: data collection, data
preprocessing, data modelling, model validation and results
interpretation.
A. Data collection
The data used in this study was collected from the
Database Systems course, from the Faculty of Electronics,
Telecommunications, and Information Technologies, at the
Politehnica University Timișoara. The data sets include
Moodle course logs and course grade books exported from our
university learning management system (UPT Virtual
Campus). This study considers Database Systems course data,
gathered over five years, from 2015 to 2019.
Moodle course logs contain detailed information about
student activity, including student’s ID number, the date and
time when course-specific information was collected, the
context and name of student actions, the address of the
machine from which the access was made. It should be noted
that course tutors can export and capitalize such log data from
the Moodle course administration section.
The initial data set (DS1), obtained by merging log data
from all instances of the Database Systems course, includes
no less than 237.441 records. For each event record, 11
attributes were collected, such as: Time, User full name,
Affected user, Event context, Component, Event name,
Description, Origin, IP address, Moodle ID, Unix time.
Also, Moodle tutors can export course grade books from
the course grades administration section. A grade book
contains all the grades for each student in a course. In our case,
the grade books of the Database Systems instances from 2015
until 2019 follow the same format: Moodle ID, Meeting 01,
Meeting 02, Meeting 03, …, Meeting 14, Final activity grade.
Regarding the Database Systems course considered for
this study, students participate in 14 mandatory face-to-face
practical activity meetings during the semester (two of which
are allocated for recovery of lost activities), but they do not
receive grades for all these meetings. Therefore, most Meeting
attributes have null values. In this case, we considered only
the data corresponding to the first 12 study weeks. The second
data set (DS2), obtained by merging the Database Systems
course grade books data, includes 629 records.
B. Data preprocessing
The data preprocessing refers to any type of processing
performed on our initial data sets to prepare them for applying
clustering methods. After completing the data collection
process, we have two data sets. The first data set (DS1)
contains information about online user activity in the Database
Systems course, while the second one (DS2) stores
information about student performance in class.
The data cleaning process on our initial data sets was done
separately, for each one. For the first data set, the cleanup
operation considered removing several types of records:
records that did not belong to students (course interventions
form tutors or Moodle administrators), records of re-enrolled
students, records that contain null values, or records of
duplicate events (similar student actions in very short time-
frame). Since the present work aims at student clustering
according to their online activities and grades for 12 study
weeks, some more records were discarded from the data set
(activities carried out outside the study period considered).
After removing all these log records, the first data set contains
a total of 185.206 instances.
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A total of 32 student records were discarded from DS2 due
to incomplete information (students without class activity), or
duplicate information (re-enrolled students). The data set
contains a total of 597 instances after cleaning.
Since the first data set (DS1) contains browsing history
events carried out during the 12 weeks of study and multiple
records are available for each student, we focused on grouping
and aggregating them for each one. In a feature engineering
process, first, we grouped records for each student and
aggregate them. By counting unique date values for each
student, we introduced a new attribute Course visits.
A new grouping operation on DS1 data set considered the
attributes Moodle ID and Visit date, where the attribute Visit
date was extracted from the Unix time attribute. This time a
standard count aggregation function was used to obtain the
number of events accessed by each student daily. Performing
a second grouping operation on the data set that resulted in the
previous step, another two attributes were created: Min events,
and Max events. These attributes were introduced by setting
appropriate aggregation functions (min, max) for each group.
Attributes introduced by feature engineering represent
numerical indicators of a student's browsing history in the
online course. The data set obtained by joining the resulting
data sets consists of unique student records with a total of 597
x 4 data points. Only attributes that make sense in cluster
analysis have been preserved: Moodle ID, Course visits, Min
events, and Max events.
The same feature engineering process took place on the
DS2 data set. By applying min, max, and mean aggregation
functions, the attributes Min grade, Max grade, and Activity
grade were introduced. The data set, obtained by removing the
attributes that are no longer of interest, consists of a total
number of 597 x 4 data points, with the following attributes:
Moodle ID, Min grade, Max grade, and Activity grade.
Data normalization is a common preprocessing practice,
also required before using K-Means clustering algorithm. To
avoid cases in which attributes have different weight in the
decision process we applied standard normalization [11]. To
perform normalization, we used the mean (μ) and the standard
deviation (σ) for each attribute.
= ( − )/ (1)
Each normalized value is obtained by subtracting the mean
of the corresponding attribute and dividing the value by the
standard deviation. The standard normalization ensures that
each attribute has a normal distribution with zero mean and
standard deviation equal to one.
After data preprocessing, our experiment benefits a new
data set obtained by merging the last version of DS1 and DS2
data sets with index Moodle ID. The final data set contained a
total of 597 x 7 data points, with the following attributes:
Moodle ID (MID), Course visits (CVD), Min events (MIED),
Max events (MXED), Min grade (MIGR), Max grade
(MXGR), and Activity grade (AVGR). Two attributes were
removed from the final data set before cluster analysis. The
attribute Moodle ID is the unique identifier of each student,
while the attribute Min events has extremely low variance.
C. Cluster analysis
Cluster analysis represents a set of exploratory techniques
that are used to identify groups of similar objects within the
data. The most popular clustering method is the K-Means
algorithm [12][13] as it is simple to understand and
implement. The K-Means algorithm is an iterative process that
partitions a data set into distinct groups (clusters), while data
points within a cluster are as similar as possible. Each cluster
is characterized by the mean of the data points assigned to that
cluster (cluster centre or centroids).
In this study, we used the Silhouette analysis to choose the
optimal value for the number of clusters (k). A Silhouette
analysis is a better approach that can be used to measure the
separation distance between clusters. The implementation of
the Silhouette analysis is done by calculating the average
Silhouette coefficient for different values of k. The Silhouette
coefficient is calculated by using (2), where x is the mean
distance between a sample and all other points in the same
cluster and y is the mean distance between a sample and all
other points in the nearest cluster [14].
= ( − )/max( , )
The Silhouette coefficient values vary between -1 and 1.
A value close to 1 means that the sample is close to its cluster,
while a value close to -1 denotes that the sample is assigned to
the wrong cluster.
III. RESULTS
Our clustering experiment was performed using Scikit-
learn [15], a popular, extensive, and powerful Python package
for implementing machine learning. The Scikit-learn package
provides tools for data preprocessing, data modelling, model
validation, and so forth. To conduct our experiment, we used
the most common K-Means clustering algorithm
implementation from Scikit-learn.
We have a final data set with 597 unique students that we
will be able to create effective clusters with. The data set
contains numerical variables like Course visits (days), the
number of days in which each student accessed the Database
Systems course on Moodle university platform, or Activity
grade, the average grade of each student in face-to-face course
meetings during the first 12 weeks of study.
The K-Means clustering algorithm is applied to this data
set with k between 2 and 10, followed by the calculation of the
average silhouette coefficient for each k. The results indicate
values for average silhouette coefficient between 0.355 and
0.396.
Fig. 1. Average silhouette coefficient depending on k value
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Fig. 2. Profiling variables - Heat Map
Presence of five different clusters can be inferred. The
information provided in Fig. 2 showing the graphical
representation of the variables per cluster can be used to
understand what type of students’ part of each cluster are.
(2) The first cluster (Cluster 0) contains a total of 131 students.
We can see that students from this cluster have most days with
access to the online course (49.60 for CVD), even if the
maximum number of daily events is low (27.00 for MXED).
The mean values for their face-to-face meetings variables are:
3.37 for MIGR, 8.52 for MXGR, and 6.05 for AVGR.
In the second cluster (Cluster 1) we can find 78 students.
This cluster contains the students with the best average values
of variables, that denotes performance in face-to-face
meetings. Even the values of the variables corresponding to
accessing online resources have good values. The mean values
for their variables are: 46.80 for MXED, 41.30 for CVD, 7.11
for MIGR, 9.34 for MXGR, and 8.26 for AVGR.
The third cluster (Cluster 2) is composed of 93 students.
These students have the best value in terms of maximum
events per day, good value for daily course visits, but not so
good marks in face-to-face activity meetings. The mean
values for their variables are: 58.90 for MXED, 37.60 for
CVD, 4.16 for MIGR, 7.07 for MXGR, and 5.60 for AVGR.
The fourth cluster (Cluster 3) consists of 179 students,
being the most populated cluster of all. They are part of the
two poorest performing clusters in terms of accessing online
resources, with 25.90 in MXED and 31.60 in CVD. However,
these students have appreciable values of the maximum grade
(8.85 in MXGR) and medium values of the average activity
grade (6.74 in AVGR), but only 4.57 in MIGR.
The last cluster (Cluster 4) contains 116 students. They
have the lowest performance for all variables considered. The
mean values are: 26.10 for MXED, 29.50 for CVD, 2.73 for
MIGR, 5.93 for MXGR, and 4.32 for AVGR.
IV. DISCUSSIONS
The student cluster analysis was conducted at the
Politehnica University of Timișoara using course data
gathered over a period of five years, from 2015 to 2019. The
results of this study reveal that within our Database Systems
course could be identified five different student clusters based
on browsing history events logged in Moodle platform and
activity grades. The optimal value for the number of clusters
(five) used in the K-Means algorithm was validated by the
maximum average silhouette coefficient (0.3963).
We can better visualize differences between clusters by
plotting the means of the profiling variables for each cluster.
As shown in Fig. 3, Cluster 4 can be labelled At-Risk and
includes students with the lowest grade performance and
minimal involvement in accessing the course's online
resources. Within this group are found over 86% of students
who do not complete the activity in the 14th week. We must
reiterate that the data set used within the cluster analysis from
this study considers the first 12 weeks of study. We also find
low involvement in accessing online resources from students
belonging to Cluster 3. We labelled this cluster Minimal
Involvement Works, because, despite the low involvement in
accessing online resources, students in this cluster complete
the activity without much effort.
Another group in which we identify students who did not
complete the activity, even if much less, is Cluster 2. Only 8%
of students who did not complete the activity at the end of the
14 weeks of study are part of this group. We labelled this
cluster Unsuccessful Hard Working because the
representatives of this cluster have a medium value in terms
of the number of days they access online resources (MXED),
and the highest value of the maximum number of events
accessed daily (CVD). However, the average value of the
Activity grade (AVG) variable does not exceed 5.60. We can
say that within this group there are students who have
problems in understanding certain aspects of the course.
In Cluster 0 we find the students who present most of the
days with access to the online course, but with a small number
of maximum daily events. We labelled this cluster Potential
Loyalists. A final group, Cluster 1, belongs to the Champions,
students who have the best study performance, and high
values both for the number of days they access the course and
for the maximum number of events held daily.
Another element that can be noticed in Fig. 3 is the
presence of two groups of variables for each cluster. The first
group, defined by the variables Min grade, Max grade and
Activity grade, determines the performance of students from
each cluster in face-to-face meetings. The second group,
defined by the variables Max events and Course visits,
describes the students' behaviour in terms of accessing online
resources. Based on these groups we can designate two
clusters (Cluster 3 and Cluster 4) whose students exhibit
similar behaviours in terms of accessing online resources.
Similarly, two other clusters can be specified (Cluster 0 and
Cluster 3) whose students have close study performances. As
stated in [16], using this approach we can cluster students with
similar preferences for group formation purposes, allowing
students to work in a more motivating environment.
Fig. 3. Profiling variables - Snake Plot
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V. CONCLUSIONS
This study shows that the approach used herein is a
practical way to define homogenous student groups in the
Database Systems course based on the K-Means clustering
algorithm and student online activities recorded within
Moodle course logs from our university learning management
system. The results offer the premises for monitoring and
identifying the students who present the risk of not completing
the course activity.
Future research might focus on evaluating the
performance of multiple clustering algorithms on current data
sets, or even on including in research other long-term courses
from our university learning management system.
The information gained in this clustering study may
facilitate the development of effective clustering Moodle
based tools both at the university level and within the
educational community that uses Moodle.
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