Exploring the Effect of Student Confusion in Massive Open Online Courses

Although thousands of students enroll in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for learning and self-improvement, many get confused, harming learning and increasing dropout rates. In this paper, we quantify these effects in two large MOOCs. We first describe how we automatically estimate students' confusion by looking at their clicking behavior on course content and participation in the course discussion forums. We then apply survival analysis to quantify the impact of confusion on students' dropout. The results demonstrate that the more confusion students express themselves and the more they are exposed to other students' confusion, the sooner they drop out of the course. We also explore the effects of confusion expressed in different contexts and related to different aspects of courses. We conclude with implications for the design of interventions to improve student retention in MOOCs.