Factors Influencing Romanian Teachers' Choice of IT Training to Avoid Issues Raised by Online Education: A Data Mining Approach

Raising the students' academic performance and improving the overall quality of education is an important goal of our society. With the exploding development of information technologies, Educational Data Mining has become a growing activity that uses the essence of Data Mining concepts to help institutions learn useful information on various academic issues. Romanian schools are facing several problems and inequalities, many of which were accentuated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when, due to restrictions on physical proximity, classes were held entirely or partly online. This paper aims to presents an experimental study on modelling teachers' attitudes towards attending IT professional development courses to deliver quality online lessons. A real data set collected through a questionnaire answered by 956 teachers is used. The final goal was that, after the best-performing model was built, the features that are significant in this approach would be analyzed. These features are influential factors in teachers' choices. We initially considered four classification techniques, after which, we refined the optimization process for Random Forest, which proved, from the first experiments, the best performance.