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The project presented in this paper aims to formulate a recommendation framework that consolidates the higher education students' particulars such as their academic background, current study and student activity records, their attended higher education institution's expectations of graduate attributes and self-assessment of their own generic competencies. The gap between the higher education students' generic competence development and their current statuses such as their academic performance and their student activity involvement was incorporated into the framework to come up with a recommendation for the student activities that lead to their generic competence development. For the formulation of the recommendation framework, the data mining tool Orange with some programming in Python and machine learning models was applied on 14,556 students' activity and academic records in the case higher education institution to find out three major types of patterns between the students' participation of the student activities and (1) their academic performance change, (2) their programmes of studies, and (3) their English results in the public examination. These findings are also discussed in this paper.

Generic competence (GC) development is an integral part of higher education to provide holistic education and enhance student career development. It also plays a critical role in complementing the curriculum. Many tertiary institutions provide various GC development activities (GCDA). Moreover, institutions strongly need to further understand student participation, especially its relationship to student backgrounds, activity profiles, and academic results. With the fast advancement of educational technologies and data mining, data analytics (DA) in formal learning and online education has been widely explored. However, there has been little work on student behavior in GCDA. To fill this gap and to provide new contributions, we conduct a comprehensive study to investigate the interrelationship of GCDA participation and academic performance before and after higher education with significant and representative data (over 10 000 records) across three years. Hypotheses are formulated and validated, and the findings are triangulated with machine learning (ML) and DA. With supervised learning, the predictors of academic performance and GCDA participation are formulated, and the features to enhance predictions are analyzed. We develop predictors using novel approaches of genetic algorithms and Stacking in ML. The impacts of the breadth and depth of involvement are also studied. Results indicate that involvement in GCDA positively impacts student academic results. Our novel approaches give improvements in predicting student participation. Our holistic studies covering hypothesis validation, data analysis, and ML provide valuable insights into GCDA development.

The project presented in this paper aims to formulate a recommendation framework that consolidates the higher education students' particulars such as their academic background, current study and student activity records, their attended higher education institution's expectations of graduate attributes and self-assessment of their own generic competencies. The gap between the higher education students' generic competence development and their current statuses such as their academic performance and their student activity involvement was incorporated into the framework to come up with a recommendation for the student activities that lead to their generic competence development. For the formulation of the recommendation framework, the data mining tool Orange with some programming in Python and machine learning models was applied on 14,556 students' activity and academic records in the case higher education institution to find out three major types of patterns between the students' participation of the student activities and (1) their academic performance change, (2) their programmes of studies, and (3) their English results in the public examination. These findings are also discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]