Project Summary

Massive Open Online Courses (also known as MOOCs) have revolutionized the concept of online education by providing high quality education to millions of students worldwide. However, they continue to be an object of criticism among education researchers as the dropout rates in such platforms is extremely high. The successful application of learning analytics in educational institutions to improve the student retention highlights their ability to improve student’s success in online education. In this project, we present a self-assessment tool for MOOC learners, EduCheck, which uses learning analytics to harness data about their performance, progress, participation and pain points. Further, learners can use this data to monitor and improve their performance.

Duration: 3 months

Responsibilities: Literature Research, Affinity Analysis, Wireframing, IA flows and Visual Design.

The biggest MOOCs ( Massive Open Online Courses) irony

24000+

Online courses offered

43000

Average enrollments per course

10%

Completion rate

Why low completion rate?

Traditional classrooms

  • Constant monitoring of students by instructors
  • Timely feedback of their progress, performance & participation in class
  • Higher student engagement and retention

Online classrooms

  • No monitoring of students
  • Asynchronous feedback on progress, performance and participation
  •  Low student engagement and high dropouts

Presenting EduCheck

An application that facilitates Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) learners to increase their engagement by

  • Tracking their week-wise progress in videos and assignments
  • Comparing their performance with peers
  • Motivating them to participate in discussion forums

The users need to add the account of the MOOC platform
to allow EduCheck to access their courses in that platform

The user can sort the courses based on whether they are behind schedule or on schedule in the course and filter the search of their courses based on either categories or joining date

The users can choose from a bunch of courses they are enrolled in a particular MOOC platform

The application provides feedback to the users regarding their progress in courses, performance with respect to their peers and participation in discussion forums

In the progress tab,  the user can see the number of assignments he/she missed or submitted. It also informs the user about the deadline of the ongoing assignments

Comparing user performance

In the performance tab, the user can analyse his/her grades with respect to other students in the course. This helps the user understand if he/she is below average or above average. This will motivate the user to improve his/her grades in order to fall in the above average part of the graph.

Increasing user participation

In the participation tab, the user can click on the trending topics in discussion related to course and otherwise on discussion forum to engage better and benefit from peer to peer discussions.

Future Work....

Undoubtedly, learning analytics can offer a wide range of benefits in education because of its ability to collect data about learners and optimize their learning. A number of studies on learning analytics in MOOCs highlights the large impact it can have in improving learner’s success. In this project, we presented 4Ps namely performance, participation, pain points and progress where learning analytics can intervene to report learners about their behavior. In future, we plan to deploy and evaluate our system with MOOC learners to study the impact SAT model can have in enhancing their engagement and improving their success rates.