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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: 3, Insightful) by ngarrang on Friday October 23 2015, @03:50AM
I have completed over 25 MOOCs since 2013. Coursera, EdX, StanfordX, Microsoft Virtual Academy. I have started and dropped many more. Why? Because the courses are free, I will enroll in anything that looks interesting. I rank them based on how important they are to me and if it looks like I am taking too many at once, I will drop them off in order of least important. I have also dropped courses because the professor was a cocky idiot. Or because the testing method was so utterly ridiculous as to be unnecessarily difficult. I think their stats might be more accurate if they look only at people that have paid upfront for a verified statement, as they have money invested. The rest of us free loaders don't really count.
(Score: 1) by MikeVDS on Friday October 23 2015, @02:53PM
I do the same thing