MOOC Dropout Prediction Based on Multidimensional Time-Series Data

Massive open online courses have attracted millions of learners worldwide with flexible learning options. However, online learning differs from offline education in that the lack of communicative feedback is a drawback that magnifies high dropout rates. The analysis and prediction of student’s online learning process can help teachers find the students with dropout tendencies in time and provide additional help. Previous studies have shown that analyzing learning behaviors at different time scales leads to different prediction results. In addition, noise in the time-series data of student behavior can also interfere with the prediction results. To address these issues, we propose a dropout prediction model that combines a multiscale fully convolutional network and a variational information bottleneck. The model extracts multiscale features of student behavior time-series data by constructing a multiscale full convolutional network and then uses a variational information bottleneck to suppress the effect of noise on the prediction results. This study conducted multiple cross-validation experiments on KDD CUP 2015 data set. The results showed that the proposed method achieved the best performance compared to the baseline method.