Predicting Certification in MOOCs Based on Students’ Weekly Activities

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been growing rapidly, offering low-cost knowledge for both learners and content providers. However, currently there is a very low level of course purchasing (less than 1% of the total number of enrolled students on a given online course opt to purchase its certificate). This can impact seriously the business model of MOOCs. Nevertheless, MOOC research on learners' purchasing behaviour on MOOCs remains limited. Thus, the umbrella question that this work tackles is if learner's data can predict their purchasing decision (certification). Our fine-grained analysis attempts to uncover the latent correlation between learner activities and their decision to purchase. We used a relatively large dataset of 5 courses of 23 runs obtained from the less studied MOOC platform of FutureLearn to: (1) statistically compare the activities of non-paying learners with course purchasers, (2) predict course certification using different classifiers, optimising for this naturally strongly imbalanced dataset. Our results show that learner activities are good predictors of course purchasibility; still, the main challenge was that of early prediction. Using only student number of step accesses, attempts, correct and wrong answers, our model achieve promising accuracies, ranging between 0.81 and 0.95 across the five courses. The outcomes of this study are expected to help design future courses and predict the profitability of future runs; it may also help determine what personalisation features could be provided to increase MOOC revenue.

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“…The data might then be used by teachers to develop various material kinds for differentiated education with their students. LA could also evaluate the behavior and performance of previous students to forecast academic success in the future [28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

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“…Digital learning has been revolutionising and changing the means of modern education. Consequently, Several MOOC platforms have been introduced over the last decade, especially in 2012, coining 2012 as "the year of the MOOCs" [1,2]. Since then, several platforms, such as FutureLearn, edX, Udemy and Coursera, have introduced free and paid online educational content to the public, targeting learners worldwide [3,4].…”