Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become one of the most popular ways of learning in recent years due to their flexibility and convenience. However, high dropout rate has become a prominent problem that hinders the further development of MOOCs. Therefore, the prediction of student dropouts is the key to further enhance the MOOCs platform.…

The system architecture of big data in massive open online courses (BD-MOOCs System Architecture) is composed of six components. The first component was comprised of big data tools and technologies such as Hadoop, YARN, HDFS, Spark, Hive, Sqoop, and Flume. The second component was educational data science, which is composed of the following four…

LearnSphere is a web-based data infrastructure designed to transform scientific discovery and innovation in education. It supports learning researchers in addressing a broad range of issues including cognitive, social, and motivational factors in learning, educational content analysis, and educational technology innovation. LearnSphere integrates…

As a research field geared toward understanding and improving learning, Learning Analytics (LA) must be able to provide empirical support for causal claims. However, as a highly applied field, tightly controlled randomized experiments are not always feasible nor desirable. Instead, researchers often rely on observational data, based on which they…

Purpose: The digitalization of society results in challenges and opportunities for learning and education. This paper describes exemplary transformations from current to future practices. It illustrates multi-dimensional aspects of learning which complement and transcend current frameworks of learning focused on schools. While digital technologies…