Zipf’s Law in MOOC Learning Behavior, Chang Men, Xiu Li, Zhihui Du, Jason Liu, Manli Li, and Xiaolei Zhang. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Big Data Analysis (ICBDA 2017), March 2017. [paper]
Abstract
Learners participating in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have a wide range of backgrounds and motivations. Many MOOC learners sign up the courses to take a brief look; only a few go through the entire content, and even fewer are able to eventually obtain a certificate. We discovered this phenomenon after having examined 76 courses on the xuetangX platform. More specifically, we found that in many courses the learning coverage—one of the metrics used to estimate the learners’ active engagement with the online courses—observes a Zipf distribution. We apply the maximum likelihood estimation method to fit the Zipf’s law and test our hypothesis using a chi-square test. The result from our study is expected to bring insight to the unique learning behavior on MOOC and thus help improve the effectiveness of MOOC learning platforms and the design of courses.
Bibtex
@inproceedings{mooczipf,
title = {Zipf’s Law in MOOC Learning Behavior},
author = {Chang Men and Xiu Li and Zhihui Du and Jason Liu and Manli Li and Xiaolei Zhang},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Big Data Analysis (ICBDA 2017)},
month = {March},
year = {2017}
}