Readers are recommended to start with Zawacki-Richter et al.'s'Systematic review of research on artificial intelligence applications in higher education.' The authors reduced an initial trawl of 2656 articles published between 2007 and 2018 in peer reviewed journals down to 146 articles that met their selection criteria. The Zawacki-Richter at al. paper gives readers a good overview of the various areas where AI is being applied in higher education, as well as an indication of which areas researchers have tended to focus on. One of the areas identified by Zawacki-Richter et al. was the use of AI to predict final academic performance based on test results earlier in a course (profiling and prediction). The second paper in this issue by Akçapinar, Altun and Askar observed that 74% of the students who were unsuccessful at the end of term in an online computer science course in Turkey could be accurately predicted through the use of a specific algorithm (kNN) in as short as 3 weeks from the beginning of the course.

The low birth rate in Taiwan has led to a severe challenge for many universities to enroll a sufficient number of students. Consequently, a large number of students have been admitted to universities regardles...