Educational Content Linking for Enhancing Learning Need Remediation in MOOCs

Since its introduction in 2011, there have been over 4000 MOOCs on various subjects on the Web, serving over 35 million learners. MOOCs have shown the ability to democratize knowledge dissemination and bring the best education in the world to every learner. However, the disparate distances between participants, the size of the learner population, and the heterogeneity of the learners' backgrounds make it extremely difficult for instructors to interact with the learners in a timely manner, which adversely affects learning experience. To address the challenges, in this thesis, we propose a framework: educational content linking. By linking and organizing pieces of learning content scattered in various course materials into an easily accessible structure, we hypothesize that this framework can provide learners guidance and improve content navigation. Since most instruction and knowledge acquisition in MOOCs takes place when learners are surveying course materials, better content navigation may help learners find supporting information to resolve their confusion and thus improve learning outcome and experience. To support our conjecture, we present end-to-end studies to investigate our framework around two research questions: 1) can manually generated linking improve learning? 2) can learning content be generated with machine learning methods? For studying the first question, we built an interface that present learning materials and visualize the linking among them simultaneously. We found the interface enables users to search for desired course materials more efficiently, and retain more concepts more readily. For the second question, we propose an automatic content linking algorithm based on conditional random fields. We demonstrate that automatically generated linking can still lead to better learning, although the magnitude of the improvement over the unlinked interface is smaller.