An object-centric approach to multi-entity educational process mining

Educational Process Mining (EPM) is widely used to analyze learning processes in technology-enhanced learning environments. However, most EPM approaches remain case-centric, linking each event to a single entity (e.g., student or course), which prevents the analysis of learning situations involving multiple interacting entities, such as group collaboration or shared resource use. Recent developments in Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM) address this limitation by allowing events to be connected to multiple related objects. Yet, the educational field lacks a practical, methodological framework for extracting structured, object-centric event data from Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Consequently, Object-Centric Educational Process Mining (OC-EPM) remains underdeveloped. This study introduces a framework for extracting multidimensional, object-centric event data from Moodle to support OC-EPM. The framework follows the OCPM 2 methodology and is implemented in PM4Moodle, an open-source tool that generates OCEL-compliant logs directly from Moodle. A case study in a university course demonstrates, to our knowledge, the first application of OC-EPM in education. The results show how object-centric data enable richer analyses of interactions among students, groups, assignments, and resources, offering insights into learning processes that cannot be captured with case-centric approaches.