Modeling MOOC Student Behavior With Two-Layer Hidden Markov Models

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide educators with an abundance of data describing how students interact with the platform, but this data is highly underutilized today. This is in part due to the lack of sophisticated tools to provide interpretable and actionable summaries of huge amounts of MOOC activity present in log data. In this paper, we propose a method for automatically discovering student behavior patterns by leveraging the click log data that can be obtained from the MOOC platform itself in a completely unsupervised manner.