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Student Skill and Goal Achievement in the Mapping with Google MOOC

Amit Deutsch
Daniel M. Russell
ACM Learning at Scale (2014)

Abstract

Students who registered for the Mapping with Google massive open online course (MOOC) were asked several questions during the registration process to identify prior experience with eleven skills as well as their goals for registering for the course. Students selected goals from a list; they were periodically reminded of these goals during the course. At the end of the course, we compared students’ self report of goal achievement on a post-course survey with behavioral click-stream analysis. In addition, we compared whether possessing skills at the outset of the course or completing course activities had a larger effect on course completion. We discovered that prior skill had no significant predictive value on certification, but students who completed course activities were more likely to earn certificates of completion than peers who did not complete activities.

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