Social Interactions Clustering MOOC Students: An Exploratory Study
This addresses the need to understand student engagement patterns in MOOCs, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study tackled the problem of clustering MOOC students based on their social interactions by analyzing comment data from FutureLearn, resulting in the identification of 3 strong and stable clusters.
An exploratory study on social interactions of MOOC students in FutureLearn was conducted, to answer "how can we cluster students based on their social interactions?" Comments were categorized based on how students interacted with them, e.g., how a student's comment received replies from peers. Statistical modelling and machine learning were used to analyze comment categorization, resulting in 3 strong and stable clusters.