Identifying Styles and Paths toward Success in MOOCs

Current schemes to categorise MOOC students result from a single view on the population which either contains the engagement of the students or demographics or self reported motivation. We propose a new hierarchical student categorisation, which uses common online activities capturing both engagement and achievement of MOOC students. A first level is based on the online engagement with the course structure, i.e., whether they take part in graded activities or not. Based on this criterion, we divide students into two major categories: active students and viewers. The second levels are based on the different activities typically performed by the students in these two categories. For the “active students”we categorise them based on their final result. For the “viewers”, we further divide the category based on their engagement quotient, i.e., how much of the course content they follow and whether they involve with the non-mandatory exercises in the course or not. Further, in this contribution we analyse the behaviour of the students in different categories to highlight the basic differences among them.