Abstract
Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are increasingly utilized for the administration, tracking, and reporting of educational activities. One such widely used LMS in higher education institutions around the world is Blackboard. This is due to its capabilities of aligning items of learning content, student-student and student-teacher interactions, and assessment tasks to specified goals and student learning outcomes. This study aimed to determine how certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on student interactions with Blackboard helped to forecast the learning outcomes of students. A mixed-methods study design was used which included analysis of four deep learning models for predicting student performance. Data were collected from reports on seven general preparation courses. They were analyzed using a documentary analysis approach to establish possible predictive KPIs associated with the electronic Blackboard report. Correlational analyses were performed to examine the extent to which these factors are linearly correlated with the performance indicators of students. Results indicated that a predictive model which combined convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory (CNN-LSTM) was the optimal method among the four models tested. The main conclusion drawn from this finding is that the combined CNN-LSTM approach may lead to interventions that optimize and expand use of the Blackboard LMS in universities.