E-Learning and Educational Big Data for Teaching Engineering: the Example of eCampus University

The great spreading of e-Learning and virtual learning platforms is fostering new forms of teaching, especially in universities. This is achieved by means of instruments such as e- Portfolios, web quests, wikis, concept maps, video lectures, quizzes and the like, but also thanks to the so-called Educational Big Data. These Big Data can be accurately “mined” and analyzed in order to obtain fruitful insights in the studying habits of the students themselves and to take proper actions to improve students’ outcomes as well as opportune retaining strategies. In this paper, we will survey the sources of Educational Big Data of a standard Virtual Learning Environment, as well as the instruments, the tools and the indicators to take advantage of them from a learning analytics viewpoint. To this aim, we take advantage of a proper case study, that one of eCampus University, one of the most well-known Italian distance learning institutions, with a particular focus on its Engineering courses.