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MOOCs — massive open online courses — grant huge numbers of people access to world-class educational resources, but they also suffer high rates of attrition.
To some degree, that's inevitable: Many people who enroll in MOOCs may have no interest in doing homework, but simply plan to listen to video lectures in their spare time.
Others, however, may begin courses with the firm intention of completing them but get derailed by life's other demands. Identifying those people before they drop out and providing them with extra help could make their MOOC participation much more productive.
[...] Last week, at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, MIT researchers showed that a dropout-prediction model trained on data from one offering of a course can help predict which students will stop out of the next offering. The prediction remains fairly accurate even if the organization of the course changes, so that the data collected during one offering doesn't exactly match the data collected during the next.
Any MOOC alumni care to comment?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @06:28AM
However, it's really easy to slack when there's no professor or permanent record breathing down your back.
This is why, as a teacher, I have always preferred Roman discipline. It a unit does not all pass the examination, we engage in "decimation". Innocent phrase, it means "10%". So, if a group of soldiers (and really, why should regular college students be held to lesser standards?) do not pass muster, one out of ten of them is executed. Brings a bit of reality to the old "I am being cool by not doing any of the reading or assignments for this class, but I am still here shooting off my ignorant mouth" ploy. One in Ten. Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya? Yes, Dirty Harry educational standards, only slightly more reprehensible than "No Child Gets Race to the Left Behind, we are privatizing your education" policy of the last TWO (count them!) American Administrations. On the Huge Manatee! At least Arne Duncan has quit. Bastard.