Capturing “attrition intensifying ” structural traits from didactic interaction sequences of MOOC learners

Abstract

This work is an attempt to discover hidden structural configurations in learning activ-ity sequences of students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Leveraging combined representations of video click-stream interactions and forum activities, we seek to fundamentally understand traits that are predictive of decreasing engage-ment over time. Grounded in the inter-disciplinary field of network science, we follow a graph based approach to success-fully extract indicators of active and pas-sive MOOC participation that reflect per-sistence and regularity in the overall in-teraction footprint. Using these rich edu-cational semantics, we focus on the prob-lem of predicting student attrition, one of the major highlights of MOOC literature in the recent years. Our results indicate an improvement over a baseline ngram based approach in capturing “attrition intensify-ing ” features from the learning activities that MOOC learners engage in. Implica-tions for some compelling future research are discussed. 1