Transfer learning for predictive models in MOOCs

Abstract

Predictive models are crucial in enabling the personalization of student experiences in Massive Open Online Courses. For successful real-time interventions, these models must be transferable - that is, they must perform well on a new course from a different discipline, a different context, or even a different MOOC platform. In this thesis, we first investigate whether predictive models "transfer" well to new courses. We then create a framework to evaluate the "transferability" of predictive models. We present methods for overcoming the biases introduced by specific courses into the models by leveraging a multi-course ensemble of models. Using 5 courses from edX, we show a predictive model that, when tested on a new course, achieved up to a 6% increase in AUCROC across 90 different prediction problems. We then tested this model on 10 courses from Coursera (a different platform) and demonstrate that this model achieves an AUCROC of 0.8 across these courses for the problem of predicting dropout one week in advance. Thus, the model "transfers" very well.