Design of an Advanced Smart Forum for Tesys e-Learning Platform

This paper presents an application of Intelligent Data Analysis techniques in the area of online educational environments and more exactly, the discussion forums within them. The research area is also referred as Educational Data Mining and have many tools and techniques already developed. This work concentrates on the improvement that can be provided by the design and implementation of a forum that has "smart" capabilities and aims to be proactive to the user's needs. The main issues addressed are the interaction design, student's academic performance and the achievement of better models by completing the already gathered data with the logged data offered by the forum. We present here three methods that can solve the above mentioned issues: recommending subjects of interest, computing trends and offering smart alerts for users that are at risk for academic failure. Every method represents a tool that will be integrated in the forum and will take benefit from the extra logged data.