Modeling Student Learning Styles in MOOCs

Yuling Shi, Zhiyong Peng, Hongning Wang

Abstract: The recorded student activities in Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provide us a unique opportunity to model their learning behaviors, identify their particular learning intents, and enable personalized assistance and guidance in online education. In this work, based on a thorough qualitative study of students' behaviors recorded in two MOOC courses with large student enrollments, we develop a non-parametric Bayesian model to capture students' sequential learning activities in a generative manner. Homogeneity of students' learning behaviors is captured by clustering them into latent student groups, where shared model structure characterizes the transitional patterns, intensity and temporal distribution of their learning activities. In the meanwhile, heterogeneity is captured by clustering students into different groups. Both qualitative and quantitative studies on those two MOOC courses confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed model in identifying students' learning behavior patterns and clustering them into related groups for predictive analysis. The identified student groups accurately predict student retention, course satisfaction and demographics.