Capturing “attrition intensifying” structural traits from didactic interaction sequences of MOOC learners

This work is an attempt to discover hidden structural configurations in learning activity sequences of students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Leveraging combined representations of video click- stream interactions and forum activities, we seek to fundamentally understand traits that are predictive of decreasing engagement over time. Grounded in the inter- disciplinary field of network science, we follow a graph based approach to success- fully extract indicators of active and passive MOOC participation that reflect persistence and regularity in the overall interaction footprint. Using these rich educational semantics, we focus on the problem of predicting student attrition, one of the major highlights of MOOC literature in the recent years. Our results indicate an improvement over a baseline n-gram based approach in capturing “attrition intensify- ing” features from the learning activities that MOOC learners engage in. Implications for some compelling future research are discussed.