Great effort is put into improving online education, focusing on how students learn and how teachers' can help the students' to be effective in that process. Recently the interest in using web mining techniques in e-learning environments (educational mining) for this purpose has increased. The efforts can be oriented towards assisting the students' learning process, the teachers' scaffolding efforts or the administrators' to make the web site more efficient. It is argued in this paper that educational mining also have great potential in deriving design guidelines for the e-learning environment and not only support the processes taking place after the system is developed and implemented.