Students at risk of dropping out
Overview
Beginning in version 3.4, Moodle core now implements open source, transparent next-generation learning analytics using machine learning backends that go beyond simple descriptive analytics to provide predictions of learner success, and ultimately diagnosis and prescriptions (advisements) to learners and teachers.
In Moodle 3.4, this system ships with a built-in model called "Students at risk of dropping out." This documentation describes this model in detail.
This model predicts students who are at risk of non-completion (dropping out) of a Moodle course, based on low student engagement. In this model, the definition of "dropping out" is "no student activity in the last week of the course." This prediction model uses the Community of Inquiry model of student engagement, consisting of three parts:
- Cognitive presence
- Social presence
- Teacher presence
Features
- This prediction model is able to analyze and draw conclusions from a wide variety of courses, and apply those conclusions to make predictions about new courses. The model is not limited to making predictions about student success only in exact duplicates of courses offered in the past.
Limitations
- This prediction model assumes that courses have fixed start and end dates, and is not designed to be used with rolling enrollment courses. Models that support a wider range of course types will be included in future versions of Moodle. Because of this model design assumption, it is very important to properly set course start and end dates for each course to use this model. If both past courses and ongoing courses start and end dates are not properly set predictions cannot be accurate. Because the course end date field was only introduced in Moodle 3.2 and some courses may not have set a course start date in the past, we include a command line interface script:
$ admin/tool/analytics/cli/guess_course_start_and_end.php
This script attempts to estimate past course start and end dates by looking at the student enrolments and students' activity logs. After running this script, please check that the estimated start and end dates script results are reasonably correct.
- This model requires a certain amount of in-Moodle data with which to make predictions. At the present time, only core Moodle activities are included in the indicator set (see below). Courses which do not include several core Moodle activities per “time slice” will have poor predictive support in this model. This prediction model will be most effective with fully online or “hybrid” or “blended” courses with substantial online components.
