Predictive Student Modeling for Interventions in Online Classes.

As large-scale online classes become more prevalent there is great interest in finding ways to model students at scale in these classes in order to predict outcomes. Student models, if successful, would help determine strong predictors of student success, which would highlight potential causal factors for such success, allowing schools to focus on refinements and interventions that positively impact their student outcomes. In this research, TutorGen has partnered with Western Governors University (WGU), a large online university, and gathered data at scale in order to build exploratory models to predict student outcomes. This paper presents our results so far in successfully identifying students who will pass (or even take) the final exam. We have examined the order in which students take courses, as well as the timing of starting and completing work; our initial analysis reveals that these are strong predictors of course outcomes.