Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Learning Management


Failure Risk Prediction in a MOOC: A Multivariate Time Series Analysis Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

MOOCs offer free and open access to a wide audience, but completion rates remain low, often due to a lack of personalized content. To address this issue, it is essential to predict learner performance in order to provide tailored feedback. Behavioral traces-such as clicks and events-can be analyzed as time series to anticipate learners' outcomes. This work compares multivariate time series classification methods to identify at-risk learners at different stages of the course (after 5, 10 weeks, etc.). The experimental evaluation, conducted on the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD), focuses on three courses: two in STEM and one in SHS. Preliminary results show that the evaluated approaches are promising for predicting learner failure in MOOCs. The analysis also suggests that prediction accuracy is influenced by the amount of recorded interactions, highlighting the importance of rich and diverse behavioral data.


Awesome-OL: An Extensible Toolkit for Online Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, online learning has attracted increasing attention due to its adaptive capability to process streaming and non-stationary data. To facilitate algorithm development and practical deployment in this area, we introduce Awesome-OL, an extensible Python toolkit tailored for online learning research. Awesome-OL integrates state-of-the-art algorithm, which provides a unified framework for reproducible comparisons, curated benchmark datasets, and multi-modal visualization. Built upon the scikit-multiflow open-source infrastructure, Awesome-OL emphasizes user-friendly interactions without compromising research flexibility or extensibility.


A Comprehensive Review of AI-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Applications and Challenges

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have significant potential to transform teaching and learning. As efforts continue to design, develop, and integrate ITS into educational contexts, mixed results about their effectiveness have emerged. This paper provides a comprehensive review to understand how ITS operate in real educational settings and to identify the associated challenges in their application and evaluation. We use a systematic literature review method to analyze numerous qualified studies published from 2010 to 2025, examining domains such as pedagogical strategies, NLP, adaptive learning, student modeling, and domain-specific applications of ITS. The results reveal a complex landscape regarding the effectiveness of ITS, highlighting both advancements and persistent challenges. The study also identifies a need for greater scientific rigor in experimental design and data analysis. Based on these findings, suggestions for future research and practical implications are proposed.


Multimodal Fine-grained Reasoning for Post Quality Evaluation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurately assessing post quality requires complex relational reasoning to capture nuanced topic-post relationships. However, existing studies face three major limitations: (1) treating the task as unimodal categorization, which fails to leverage multimodal cues and fine-grained quality distinctions; (2) introducing noise during deep multimodal fusion, leading to misleading signals; and (3) lacking the ability to capture complex semantic relationships like relevance and comprehensiveness. To address these issues, we propose the Multimodal Fine-grained Topic-post Relational Reasoning (MFTRR) framework, which mimics human cognitive processes. MFTRR reframes post-quality assessment as a ranking task and incorporates multimodal data to better capture quality variations. It consists of two key modules: (1) the Local-Global Semantic Correlation Reasoning Module, which models fine-grained semantic interactions between posts and topics at both local and global levels, enhanced by a maximum information fusion mechanism to suppress noise; and (2) the Multi-Level Evidential Relational Reasoning Module, which explores macro- and micro-level relational cues to strengthen evidence-based reasoning. We evaluate MFTRR on three newly constructed multimodal topic-post datasets and the public Lazada-Home dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that MFTRR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 9.52% NDCG@3 improvement over the best unimodal method on the Art History dataset.


Ranking-Based At-Risk Student Prediction Using Federated Learning and Differential Features

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Digital textbooks are widely used in various educational contexts, such as university courses and online lectures. Such textbooks yield learning log data that have been used in numerous educational data mining (EDM) studies for student behavior analysis and performance prediction. However, these studies have faced challenges in integrating confidential data, such as academic records and learning logs, across schools due to privacy concerns. Consequently, analyses are often conducted with data limited to a single school, which makes developing high-performing and generalizable models difficult. This study proposes a method that combines federated learning and differential features to address these issues. Federated learning enables model training without centralizing data, thereby preserving student privacy. Differential features, which utilize relative values instead of absolute values, enhance model performance and generalizability. To evaluate the proposed method, a model for predicting at-risk students was trained using data from 1,136 students across 12 courses conducted over 4 years, and validated on hold-out test data from 5 other courses. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method addresses privacy concerns while achieving performance comparable to that of models trained via centralized learning in terms of Top-n precision, nDCG, and PR-AUC. Furthermore, using differential features improved prediction performance across all evaluation datasets compared to non-differential approaches. The trained models were also applicable for early prediction, achieving high performance in detecting at-risk students in earlier stages of the semester within the validation datasets.


Bridging MOOCs, Smart Teaching, and AI: A Decade of Evolution Toward a Unified Pedagogy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- Over the past decade, higher education ha s evolved through three distinct paradigms: the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the integration of Smart Teaching technologies into classrooms, and the rise of AI - enhanced learning . Each paradigm is intended to address specific challenges in traditional education: MOOCs enable ubiquitous access to learning resources; Smart Teaching supports real - time interaction with data - driven insights; and generative AI offers personalized feedback and on - demand content generation. However, the se paradigms are often implemented in isol ation due to the ir disparate technological origins and policy - driven adoption . This paper examines the origins, strengths, and limitations of each paradigm, and advocates a unified pedagogical perspective that synthesizes their complementary affordances. W e propose a three - layer instructional framework that combines the scalability of MOOCs, the responsiveness of Smart Teaching, and the adaptivity of AI . To demonstrate its feasibility, we present a curriculum design for a project - based course . The findings highlight the framework's potential to enhance learner engagement, support instructors, and enable personalized yet scalable learning. T he landscape of higher education h as undergone multiple waves of digital transformation over the past decade .


Imitating Mistakes in a Learning Companion AI Agent for Online Peer Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, peer learning has gained attention as a method that promotes spontaneous thinking among learners, and its effectiveness has been confirmed by numerous studies. This study aims to develop an AI Agent as a learning companion that enables peer learning anytime and anywhere. However, peer learning between humans has various limitations, and it is not always effective. Effective peer learning requires companions at the same proficiency levels. In this study, we assume that a learner's peers with the same proficiency level as the learner make the same mistakes as the learner does and focus on English composition as a specific example to validate this approach.


Extension OL-MDISF: Online Learning from Mix-Typed, Drifted, and Incomplete Streaming Features

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Online learning, where feature spaces can change over time, offers a flexible learning paradigm that has attracted considerable attention. However, it still faces three significant challenges. First, the heterogeneity of real-world data streams with mixed feature types presents challenges for traditional parametric modeling. Second, data stream distributions can shift over time, causing an abrupt and substantial decline in model performance. Additionally, the time and cost constraints make it infeasible to label every data instance in a supervised setting. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new algorithm Online Learning from Mix-typed, Drifted, and Incomplete Streaming Features (OL-MDISF), which aims to relax restrictions on both feature types, data distribution, and supervision information. Our approach involves utilizing copula models to create a comprehensive latent space, employing an adaptive sliding window for detecting drift points to ensure model stability, and establishing label proximity information based on geometric structural relationships. To demonstrate the model's efficiency and effectiveness, we provide theoretical analysis and comprehensive experimental results. This extension serves as a standalone technical reference to the original OL-MDISF method. It provides (i) a contextual analysis of OL-MDISF within the broader landscape of online learning, covering recent advances in mixed-type feature modeling, concept drift adaptation, and weak supervision, and (ii) a comprehensive set of experiments across 14 real-world datasets under two types of drift scenarios. These include full CER trends, ablation studies, sensitivity analyses, and temporal ensemble dynamics. We hope this document can serve as a reproducible benchmark and technical resource for researchers working on nonstationary, heterogeneous, and weakly supervised data streams.


PROL : Rehearsal Free Continual Learning in Streaming Data via Prompt Online Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The data privacy constraint in online continual learning (OCL), where the data can be seen only once, complicates the catastrophic forgetting problem in streaming data. A common approach applied by the current SOTAs in OCL is with the use of memory saving exemplars or features from previous classes to be replayed in the current task. On the other hand, the prompt-based approach performs excellently in continual learning but with the cost of a growing number of trainable parameters. The first approach may not be applicable in practice due to data openness policy, while the second approach has the issue of throughput associated with the streaming data. In this study, we propose a novel prompt-based method for online continual learning that includes 4 main components: (1) single light-weight prompt generator as a general knowledge, (2) trainable scaler-and-shifter as specific knowledge, (3) pre-trained model (PTM) generalization preserving, and (4) hard-soft updates mechanism. Our proposed method achieves significantly higher performance than the current SOTAs in CI-F AR100, ImageNet-R, ImageNet-A, and CUB dataset. Our complexity analysis shows that our method requires a relatively smaller number of parameters and achieves moderate training time, inference time, and throughput.


SentiDrop: A Multi Modal Machine Learning model for Predicting Dropout in Distance Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

School dropout is a serious problem in distance learning, where early detection is crucial for effective intervention and student perseverance. Predicting student dropout using available educational data is a widely researched topic in learning analytics. Our partner's distance learning platform highlights the importance of integrating diverse data sources, including socio-demographic data, behavioral data, and sentiment analysis, to accurately predict dropout risks. In this paper, we introduce a novel model that combines sentiment analysis of student comments using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model with socio-demographic and behavioral data analyzed through Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). We fine-tuned BERT on student comments to capture nuanced sentiments, which were then merged with key features selected using feature importance techniques in XGBoost. Our model was tested on unseen data from the next academic year, achieving an accuracy of 84%, compared to 82% for the baseline model. Additionally, the model demonstrated superior performance in other metrics, such as precision and F1-score. The proposed method could be a vital tool in developing personalized strategies to reduce dropout rates and encourage student perseverance.