Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses

Christopher Brinton at Princeton University studied the behavior in online discussion forums of over 100,000 students taking massive open online courses (or MOOCs). Participation falls precipitously and continuously throughout a course and almost half of registered students never post more than twice to the forums. What’s more, the participation of a teacher doesn’t improve matters. Indeed, there is some evidence that a teacher’s participation in an online discussion actually increases the rate of decline.

Brinton studied the discussion threads associated with 73 courses offered by Coursera. These involved 115,000 students who wrote over 800,000 posts in 170,000 different threads. The team then plotted how the volume of discussion varied through the course and what factors correlate with this decline. Brinton found various correlations with the drop. One of these is the amount of peer-graded homework on the course, a factor which moderately increases the rate of decline. More worrying is the discovery that teacher involvement in a thread seems to accelerate the decline (although it also increases the number of posts).