Time Series Analysis of Clickstream Logs from Online Courses

Due to the rapidly rising popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), there is a growing demand for scalable automated support technologies for student learning. Transferring traditional educational resources to online contexts has become an increasingly relevant problem in recent years. For learning science theories to be applicable, educators need a way to identify learning behaviors of students which contribute to learning outcomes, and use them to design and provide personalized intervention support to the students. Click logs are an important source of information about students' learning behaviors, however current literature has limited understanding of how these behaviors are represented within click logs. In this project, we have exploited the temporal dynamics of student behaviors both to do behavior modeling via graphical modeling approaches and to do performance prediction via recurrent neural network approaches in order to first identify student behaviors and then use them to predict their final outcome in the course. Our experiments showed that the long short-term memory (LSTM) model is capable of learning long-term dependencies in a sequence and outperforms other strong baselines in the prediction task. Further, these sequential approaches to click log analysis can be successfully imported to other courses when used with results obtained from graphical model behavior modeling.