Abstract
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become an important online learning tool for educators and learners, but one of the major issues are the high drop-out rates. Recent research suggests not only to identify and support learners at-risk to drop-out but also to differentiate between the group of healthy attrition (intentionally leaving the MOOC) and unhealthy attrition (struggling to complete the MOOC). In this paper, we focus on two research questions: Firstly, can we already identify learners at-risk to drop-out a MOOC in an early stage? Secondly, can we differentiate between the group of healthy attrition and unhealthy attrition? Experimentation with Support Vector Machines based on learners logs from eleven MOOCs on the Telescope platform show first promising results.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Berge, Z.L., Huang, Y.-P.: A model for sustainable student retention: a holistic perspective on the student dropout problem with special attention to e-learning. Deosnews 13(5), 26 (2004)
Angelino, L.M., Williams, F.K., Natvig, D.: Strategies to engage online students and reduce attrition rates. J. Educ. Online 4(2), 1–14 (2007)
Gütl, C., Rizzardini, R.H., Chang, V., Morales M.: Attrition in MOOC: lessons learned from drop-out students. In: Uden, L., Sinclair, J., Tao, Y.H., Liberona, D. (eds.) Learning Technology for Education in Cloud. MOOC and Big Data. LTEC 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 446, pp. 37–48. Springer, Cham (2014)
Hernández, R., Morales, M. Gütl, C.: An attrition model for MOOCs. In: Formative Assessment, Learning Data Analytics and Gamification, pp. 295–311 (2016)
Xing, W., Chen, X., Stein, J., Marcinkowski, M.: Temporal predication of dropouts in MOOCs: reaching the low hanging fruit through stacking generalization. Comput. Hum. Behav. 58, 119–129 (2016)
Li, W., Gao, M., Li, H., Xiong, Q., Wen, J., Wu, Z.: Dropout prediction in MOOCs using behavior features and multi-view semi-supervised learning. In: 2016 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 3130–3137. IEEE (2016)
Yang, D., Sinha, T., Adamson, D., Rosé, C.P.: Turn on, tune in, drop out: anticipating student dropouts in massive open online courses. In: Proceedings of the 2013 NIPS Data-Driven Education Workshop, vol. 11, p. 14 (2013)
Lubis, F.F., Rosmansyah, Y., Supangkat, S.H.: Experience in learners review to determine attribute relation for course completion. In: 2016 International Conference on ICT For Smart Society (ICISS), pp. 32–36. IEEE (2016)
Pirker, J., Riffnaller-Schiefer, M., Tomes, L.M., Gütl, C.: Motivational active learning in blended and virtual learning scenarios: engaging students in digital learning. In: Handbook of Research on Engaging Digital Natives in Higher Education Settings, p. 416 (2016)
Hernández, R., Guetl, C., Amado-Salvatierra, H.R.: Facebook for e-moderation: a Latin-American experience. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies, p. 37. ACM (2011)
Zhang, Q., Peck, K.L., Hristova, A., Jablokow, K.W., Hoffman, V., Park, E., Bayeck, R.Y.: Exploring the communication preferences of MOOC learners and the value of preference-based groups: is grouping enough? Educ. Technol. Res. Dev. 64(4), 809–837 (2016)
Rizzardini, R.H., Gütl, C., Chang, V., Morales, M.: MOOC in Latin America: implementation and lessons learned. In: Uden, L., Tao, Y.H., Yang, H.C., Ting, I.H. (eds.) The 2nd International Workshop on Learning Technology for Education in Cloud. Springer Proceedings in Complexity, pp. 147–158. Springer, Dordrecht (2014)
Suykens, J.A., Vandewalle, J.: Least squares support vector machine classifiers. Neural Process. Lett. 9(3), 293–300 (1999)
Joachims, T.: Text categorization with support vector machines: learning with many relevant features. In: Nédellec, C., Rouveirol, C. (eds.) ECML 1998. LNCS, vol. 1398, pp. 137–142. Springer, Heidelberg (1998). doi:10.1007/BFb0026683
Vitiello, M., et al.: Classifying students to improve MOOC dropout rates. In: EMOOCs 2016 Conference, Research Track, S. 501 (2016)
Sammut, C., Webb, G.I.: Encyclopedia of Machine Learning, p. 1335. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Guetl, C., et al.: Must we be concerned with the massive drop-outs in MOOC? An attrition analysis of open courses. In: Proceedings of the International Conference Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL 2014) (2014)
MOOC Maker. Official Website (2017). http://www.mooc-maker.org/. Accessed 7 May 2017
MOOC Maker. Attrition and Retention Aspects in MOOC Environments. Version 5. Deliverable 1.6 (2017b). http://www.mooc-maker.org/wp-content/files/WPD1.6_INGLES.pdf. Accessed 7 May 2017
Amado-Salvatierra, H.R., Hilera, J.R., Tortosa, S.O., Rizzardini, R.H., Piedra, N.: Towards a semantic definition of a framework to implement accessible e-learning projects. J. Univ. Comput. Sci. 22(7), 921–942 (2016)
Martín, J.L., Amado-Salvatierra, H.R., Hilera, J.R.: MOOCs for all: evaluating the accessibility of top MOOC platforms. Int. J. Eng. Educ. 32, 5(B), 2374–2383 (2016)
Tong, S., Koller, D.: Support vector machine active learning with applications to text classification. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 2, 45–66 (2001)
Furey, T.S., et al.: Support vector machine classification and validation of cancer tissue samples using microarray expression data. Bioinformatics 16(10), 906–914 (2000)
Acknowledgment
This work is partially supported by European Union through the project MOOC-Maker www.moocmaker.org. Reference: 561533-EPP-1-2015-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Vitiello, M., Gütl, C., Amado-Salvatierra, H.R., Hernández, R. (2017). MOOC Learner Behaviour: Attrition and Retention Analysis and Prediction Based on 11 Courses on the TELESCOPE Platform. In: Uden, L., Liberona, D., Liu, Y. (eds) Learning Technology for Education Challenges. LTEC 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 734. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62743-4_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62743-4_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62742-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62743-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)