Mining Student-Generated Textual Data In MOOCS and Quantifying Their Effects on Student Performance and Learning Outcomes

Abstract

Abstract Mining Student-Generated Textual Data In MOOCS And Quantifying Their Effects on Student Performance and Learning OutcomesAbstractMassive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are freely available courses offered online for distancebased learners who have access to the internet. The tremendous success of MOOCs can in part,be attributed to their global availability, enabling anyone in the world to sign up/drop courses atany time during the course offerings. A single course enrollment in MOOCs can range between10,000 to 200,000 students, hereby providing a potentially rich venue for large scale digital data(e.g., student course comments, temporal and geo-location data, etc.). However, despite theoverabundance of digital data generated through MOOCs, research into how student interactionsin MOOCs translates to student performance and learning outcomes has been limited.The objective of this research is to mine student-generated textual data (e.g., online discussionforums) existing in MOOCs in order to quantify their impact on student performance andlearning outcomes. Student performance is quantified based on grades on course homeworkassignments, quizzes and examinations. Similar to in-class learning environments, studentsenrolled in MOOCs self-organize and form learning groups, where course topics andassignments can be discussed. One of the major benefits of MOOC data is that student networksand discussion therein are digitally stored and readily available for statistical analysis andmodeling. The proposed methodology employs robust natural language processing techniquesand data mining algorithms to quantify temporal changes in individual/group sentiments relatingto course topics and instructor clarity. Researchers aim to determine whether textual content(e.g., quality VS quantity of student forum discussions) expressed through MOOCs can serve asleading indicators of student performance in MOOCs. A case study involving two MOOCsoffered at University X, is used to validate the proposed methodology.