A predictive model for identifying students with dropout profiles in online courses

Online education often deals with the problem related to the high students’ dropout rate during a course in many areas. There is huge amount of historical data about students in online courses. Hence, a relevant problem on this context is to examine those data, aiming at finding effective mechanisms to understand student profiles, identifying those students with characteristics to drop out at early stage in the course. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing predictive models to provide educational managers with the duty to identify students whom are in the dropout bound. Four classification algorithms with different classification methods were used during the evaluation, in order to find the model with the highest accuracy in prediction the profile of dropouts students. Data for model generation were obtained from two data sources available from University. The results showed the model generated by using SVM algorithm as the most accurate among those selected, with 92.03% of accuracy.