Niki Gitinabard completed her Ph.D. entitled "Understanding Student Habits in Blended Courses: An integration of student activities on different platforms to support students better." in the Spring of 2021. She is now the Chief Scientist at Allobee inc. in Durham North Carolina.

Dr. Gitinabard worked with Dr. Collin Lynch, at the Center for Educational Informatics, modeling different student activities on online platforms associated with classes. For this purpose, I look into student interactions on the class discussion forum and replicate a social network between them based on these collaborations. We also record the sequences of student actions and generate features that tell us more about their work or study habits such as consistency. Another aspect of this work is modeling and evaluating students' teamwork based on their activities on Github. Generally we are trying to use educational data mining to identify useful behavioral patterns of students using data from online tools in CS courses. We aim to use this information to generate predictive models on the students' performance and identify at-rist students to support them better with additional resources such as group studying and peer tutoring. We also use the teamwork data to give suggestions on teammates based on similarity in work and study habits to improve their quality of collaborations.