Proposing an Evaluation Task for Identifying Struggling Students in Online Courses

This paper describes and proposes a community evaluation task that is designed for evaluating learning systems that can automatically identify different types of problems, that students may encounter with their online courses. As a basis, the learning systems would use logs from an artificial learning environment to analyse the student interactions and behaviour with the online course. The learning systems will also use specific domain models to ensure that the course requirements such as task deadlines and learning content conditions (e.g., pre-requisites) are addressed. As a result, the outputs (identified student problems) can be used by a) the learning systems to provide personalised feedback and direction to students to overcome a problem b) notify an instructor for a more professional support and response c) inform a learning designer for potential problems on the design of the course.