Negative link prediction to reduce dropout in Massive Open Online Courses

In recent years, the rapid growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has attracted much attention for related research. Besides, one of the main challenges in MOOCs is the high dropout or low completion rate. Early dropout prediction algorithms aim the educational institutes to retain the students for the related course. There are several methods for identification of the resigning students. These methods are often based on supervised machine learning, and require student activity records to train and create a prediction model based on the features extracted from the raw data. The performance of graph-based algorithms in various applications to discover the strong or weak relationships between entities using limited data encouraged us to turn to these algorithms for this problem. Objective of this paper is proposing a novel method with low complexity, negative link prediction algorithm, for the first time, utilizing only network topological data for dropout prediction. The idea is based on the assumption that entities with similar network structures are more likely to establish or remove a relation. Therefore, we first convert the data into a graph, mapping entities (students and courses) to nodes and relationships (enrollment data) to links. Then we use graph-based algorithms to predict students' dropout, utilizing just enrollment data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant performance compared to baseline ones. However, we test the supervised link prediction idea, and show the competitive and promising results in this case as well. Finally, we present important future research directions to improve the results.