Effect of uninterrupted time-on-task on students’ success in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between uninterrupted time-on-task and academic success of students enrolled in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The variables representing uninterrupted time-on-task, such as number and duration of uninterrupted consecutive learning activities, were mined from the log files capturing how 4286 students tried to learn Newtonian mechanics concepts in a MOOC. These variables were used as predictors in the logistic regression model estimating the likelihood of students getting a course certificate at the end of the semester. The analysis results indicate that the predictive power of the logistic regression model, which was assessed by Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC), depends on the value of off-task activity threshold time, and the likelihood of students getting a course certificate increases as students were doing more uninterrupted learning activities over a longer period of time. The findings from this study suggest that a simple count of learning activities, which has been used as a proxy for time-on-task in previous studies, may not accurately describe student learning in the computer-based learning environment because it does not reflect the quality, such as uninterrupted durations, of those learning activities.