Abstract
Lack of timely instructors’ support when the learners are struggling with the course contents and activities is one frequent problem of MOOC learners. The early identification of these learners could help instructors spend part of their limited time assisting them and avoid potential dropouts. This paper presents a MOOC case study that explores the behavior of learners who reported problems in private messages and discussion forums. The study aimed at the identification of parameters that might allow the detection of learners struggling with different course aspects. As the results suggested, the comparison of the learners’ activity traces reveals some common sequences that in the future could facilitate the identification of learners facing problems, even without reporting them. On the other hand, statistical analyses on learners’ behavior showed non-significant differences between the learners reporting putting their maximum effort to overcome a problem before asking for help and the ones who did not.
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Notes
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Learners were expected to discuss and complete the group activities by communicating in private group forums. Groups were composed by 5 or 6 learners.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been partially funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the National Research Agency of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovations and Universities under project grants TIN2017-85179-C3-2-R and TIN2014-53199- C3-2R, by the European Regional Development Fund (Operational program of Castile and León) and the Regional Government of Castile and León by the Regional Ministry of Education under the grant BOCYL-D-07062018-6 and the project grant VA257P18, and by the European Commission under project grant 588438-EPP-1-2017-1-EL-EPPKA2-KA.
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Topali, P., Ortega-Arranz, A., Dimitriadis, Y., Martínez-Monés, A., Villagrá-Sobrino, S.L., Asensio-Pérez, J.I. (2019). “Error 404- Struggling Learners Not Found” Exploring the Behavior of MOOC Learners. In: Scheffel, M., Broisin, J., Pammer-Schindler, V., Ioannou, A., Schneider, J. (eds) Transforming Learning with Meaningful Technologies. EC-TEL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11722. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29736-7_56
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29736-7_56
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