What Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Stakeholders Can Learn from Learning Analytics?

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are the road that led to a revolution and a new era of learning environments. Educational institutions have come under pressure to adopt new models that assure openness in their education distribution. Nonetheless, there is still altercation about the pedagogical approach and the absolute information delivery to the students.On the other side with the use of Learning Analytics, powerful tools become available which mainly aim to enhance learning and improve learners' performance. In this chapter, the development phases of a Learning Analytics prototype and the experiment of integrating it into a MOOC platform, called iMooX will be presented. This chapter explores how MOOC Stakeholders may benefit from Learning Analytics as well as it reports an exploratory analysis of some of the offered courses and demonstrate use cases as a typical evaluation of this prototype in order to discover hidden patterns, overture future proper decisions and to optimize learning with applicable and convenient interventions.

Study Effort and Student Success: A MOOC Case Study

“…Deciding to use the number of days active as the most efficient measure metric for effort over time from the log files is based on two reasonings: (a) supporting literature such as the research studies by Khalil and Ebner [13] and Kloft et al [14]. And (b) exploratory examination of correlations, knowledge of the problem domain, and examining descriptive statistics for the variables as the following.…”

“…Learning analytics studies in MOOCs have found that MOOC participation rate varies to a larger degree than for traditional higher education [4]. The dropout rate is also much higher in MOOCs than in traditional university courses [12,13].…”

Student Consent in Learning Analytics

“…Despite the frequency with which reference is made to the notion of consent and informed consent (e.g., Dawkins, 2016;Hoel & Chen, 2016;Khalil & Ebner, 2016;Roberts, Howell, Seaman, & Gibson, 2016) • Formal consent should be obtained before data are collected/analyzed;…”

Problems and solutions for using computer (networks) for education

“…Research in e-Learning today focusses not so much on new technology but on how material has to be prepared to be successful, and how students use it (Khalils and Ebner, 2016;Taraghi et al, 2013). This is also explained clearly in Serdyukov (2015).…”