Digital educational history as a component of the digital student's profile in the context of education transformation

Abstract

Introduction. The recent active development of digital educational infrastructure allows educational institutions to collect and store large amounts of data related to the learning process. In this regard, the task of describing, structuring and combining various data about the student into a single digital profile, seems relevant as it will make possible applying an integrated approach to solving the problems of data-driven management of the educational process. Materials and methods. A comparative analysis of the literature to analyze the existing terminology in the field of digital transformation of education and methods for modeling objects and processes in education, as well as to identify the components of the digital student's profile has been carried out. To assess the intensity of activity performed by students in the digital learning environment (DLE) of the university, we have conducted the survey of the 172 students of Siberian Federal University majoring in several areas of training: Computer Science and Computer Engineering, Applied Computer Science, Information Security, and Metallurgy. Results. We proposed the so-called student digitalization pyramid, which includes the following hierarchy levels: digital footprint, digital profile, digital model, digital twin. We described the structure of the digital profile of a student which includes two components – a digital personality portrait and a digital educational history and mentioned possible links between them. We introduced a classification of its components and identified the sources of obtaining these components from the university EIEE. We introduced and described in detail the concept of digital educational history which is a multidimensional structured dynamically changing data on the educational activities of the student and his current learning outcomes. We indicated the problem of completeness of digital educational history data, the presence of which is confirmed by the results of the survey. Three most frequently used sources of educational materials in addition to the university e-learning courses were identified as video hosting (used by 85.5% of respondents), educational interaction in small groups (62.2%) and learning forums (45.3%). At the same time, obtaining educational history data from these sources is a serious problem which is difficult to overcome. Conclusions. In the future, digital educational history data will become the basis for modeling a student (their learning process) and developing their digital twin. Nevertheless, there are a number of problems which concern the collection and verification of the related data, the ethics of their use and applicability for solving learning management problems. We propose possible solutions to these problems