Investigating the school characteristics/attributes via the relationships between school management efficiency and representative factors of mobile e-learning: DEA and data mining methodology

Abstract

The aim of this study is to detect the school characteristics/attributes by examining the efficiency of school management related to innovative teaching through digital mobile e-learning. This will be conducted by evaluating the results of DEA efficiency measure and data mining method (DMM).The results of DMM indicate that the schools with the total number of students in schools about 1400-3000 persons, the teacher-student ratio between 7.4 %-8.0 %, the tablet PC numbers about 1200-3000 units, the technical teacher ratio of digital mobile e-learning is about 8%-16% and the total equipment expenses associated with tablet PC about the range of 1.5-3.0 Million NTD could obtain higher operational efficiency of school management through Innovative Teaching via Digital Mobile e-learning. Based on the analytical results, the ranks of school management efficiency could divide into three groups, in the high-efficiency group (TE=1), there are three public high schools and one private higher vocational school. These all high schools are in northern Taiwan. In the medium-efficiency group (TE 0.85∼0.99), there is only one school in northern Taiwan. The low-efficiency school group (TE <0.85), there are three public schools and one private high vocational school. The three public schools are in northern Taiwan while one private high vocational school is in eastern Taiwan. In practice, we find that the public high schools are more efficient than the private high schools and public high schools are more efficient than private high schools that can achieve digital mobile e-learning. Also, and schools located in northern Taiwan more efficient than elsewhere. These research findings can also become a reference for educational institutions in developing strategies and policies for digital mobile e-learning in high school of Taiwan area.