How well do the students understand the course contents? Assessing comprehension through course videos

The popularity of MOOCs as an online education delivery alternative can be judged from the rapid increase in the number of MOOCs from the past few years. However, there are alarming concerns about the high drop-out ratios witnessed by the MOOCs. Several factors such as poor student engagement, poor lecture delivery in videos, low student–instructor interaction are known to be responsible for declining completion rates in MOOCs. Out of these, the current work focuses on poor student engagement. Many of the students tend to lose interest in the course since they are unable to follow course videos. Hence, one of the methods to quantify student engagement is to study the comprehension of course contents perceived by the students after watching the course videos. For this, we deploy a collaborative portal, named QWiki, as a part of a MOOC. QWiki is a combination of a QnA forum and a wiki portal that houses student-generated data. The student-generated data from QWiki helps evaluate the comprehension of course contents by the students. We analyze and put forth results for a MOOC based on Python programming.