Comparing Peer Recommendation Strategies in a MOOC

Abstract

Lack of social relationship has been shown to be an important contribution factor for attrition in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Helping students to connect with other students is therefore a promising solution to alleviate this phenomenon. Following up on our previous research showing that embedding a peer recommender in a MOOC had a positive impact on students' engagement in the MOOC, we compare in this paper the impact of three different peer recommenders: one based on socio-demographic criteria, one based on current progress made in the MOOC, and the last one providing random recommendations. We report our results and analysis (N = 2025 students), suggesting that the socio-demographic-based recommender had a slightly better impact than the random one.