Improved Personalization in MOOCs to Enhance Student Learning

In this era of technology, online education platforms play a very important role in delivering quality education on diverse topics, overcoming the barriers of physical accessibility, high costs or personal disabilities.  MOOCs provide an economical and flexible way to learn new skills and delivering quality educational experiences at scale.

However, despite the high enrollment numbers, approximately 90 percent of people who sign up for most MOOCs fail to complete the course. The two main reasons for dropout as reported by users seem to be one, misalignment between user’s learning experience and his expectations which de-motivates them to continue with the course, and other that users were too busy to continue.

We believe that MOOCS can play a pivotal role in educating students in underdeveloped areas where it’s difficult for large groups of individuals to learn through formal channels such as schools and colleges. MOOCs can also be extremely useful in the developed countries as a medium to augment formal education. We have seen how technology can replace humans, eg self driving cars taking over drivers, robots taking over salesmen etc. MOOCs can be useful in such dynamic environments for individuals interested in continuously learning new employable skills.

In our project, we want to improve the user retention and user experience through increased adaptivity options, personalized recommendation and self review check of the course material to make users more confident about their learnings in a course and to make the process of online learning more valuable to users.