Massive Open Online Courses Temporal Profiling for Dropout Prediction

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are attracting the attention of people all over the world. Regardless the platform, numbers of registrants for online courses are impressive but in the same time, completion rates are disappointing. Understanding the mechanisms of dropping out based on the learner profile arises as a crucial task in MOOCs, since it will allow intervening at the right moment in order to assist the learner in completing the course. In this paper, the dropout behaviour of learners in a MOOC is thoroughly studied by first extracting features that describe the behavior of learners within the course and then by comparing three classifiers (Logistic Regression, Random Forest and AdaBoost) in two tasks: predicting which users will have dropped out by a certain week and predicting which users will drop out on a specific week. The former has showed to be considerably easier, with all three classifiers performing equally well. However, the accuracy for the second task is lower, and Logistic Regression tends to perform slightly better than the other two algorithms. We found that features that reflect an active attitude of the user towards the MOOC, such as submitting their assignment, posting on the Forum and filling their Profile, are strong indicators of persistence.Comment: 8 pages, ICTAI1

Investigating Variation in Learning Processes in a FutureLearn MOOC

Studies on engagement and learning design in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have laid the groundwork for understanding how people learn in this relatively new type of informal learning environment. To advance our understanding of how people learn in MOOCs, we investigate the intersection between learning design and the temporal process of engagement in the course. This study investigates the detailed processes of engagement using educational process mining (EPM) in a FutureLearn science course (N = 2086 learners) and applying an established taxonomy of learning design to classify learning activities. The analyses were performed on three groups of learners categorised based upon their clicking behaviour. The process-mining results show at least one dominant pathway in each of the three groups, though multiple popular additional pathways were identified within each group. All three groups remained interested and engaged in the various learning and assessment activities. The findings from this study suggest that in the analysis of voluminous MOOC data there is value in first clustering learners and then investigating detailed progressions within each cluster that take the order and type of learning activities into account. The approach is promising because it provides insight into variation in behavioural sequences based on learners’ intentions for earning a course certificate. These insights can inform the targeting of analytics-based interventions to support learners and inform MOOC designers about adapting learning activities to different groups of learners based on their goals

Are you going to the party: depends, who else is coming? [Learning hidden group dynamics via conditional latent tree models]

Scalable probabilistic modeling and prediction in high dimensional multivariate time-series is a challenging problem, particularly for systems with hidden sources of dependence and/or homogeneity. Examples of such problems include dynamic social networks with co-evolving nodes and edges and dynamic student learning in online courses. Here, we address these problems through the discovery of hierarchical latent groups. We introduce a family of Conditional Latent Tree Models (CLTM), in which tree-structured latent variables incorporate the unknown groups. The latent tree itself is conditioned on observed covariates such as seasonality, historical activity, and node attributes. We propose a statistically efficient framework for learning both the hierarchical tree structure and the parameters of the CLTM. We demonstrate competitive performance in multiple real world datasets from different domains. These include a dataset on students' attempts at answering questions in a psychology MOOC, Twitter users participating in an emergency management discussion and interacting with one another, and windsurfers interacting on a beach in Southern California. In addition, our modeling framework provides valuable and interpretable information about the hidden group structures and their effect on the evolution of the time series

Online Learning for Mixture of Multivariate Hawkes Processes

Online learning of Hawkes processes has received increasing attention in the last couple of years especially for modeling a network of actors. However, these works typically either model the rich interaction between the events or the latent cluster of the actors or the network structure between the actors. We propose to model the latent structure of the network of actors as well as their rich interaction across events for real-world settings of medical and financial applications. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data showcase the efficacy of our approach.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 3 table