We study student behavior and performance in two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In doing so, we present two frameworks by which video-watching clickstreams can be represented: one based on the sequence of events created, and another on the sequence of positions visited. With the event-based framework, we extract recurring subsequences of student behavior, which contain fundamental characteris- tics such as reflecting (i.e., repeatedly playing and pausing) and revising (i.e., plays and skip backs). We find that some of these behaviors are significantly associated with whether a user will be Correct on First Attempt (CFA) or not in answering quiz questions. With the position-based framework, we then devise models for performance. In evaluating these through CFA prediction, we find that three of them can substantially improve prediction quality in terms of accuracy and F1, which underlines the ability to relate behavior to performance. Since our prediction considers videos individually, these benefits also suggest that our models are useful in situations where there is limited training data, e.g., for early detection or in short courses.
The Web has enabled one of the most visible recent developments in education---the deployment of massive open online courses. With their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning. Despite this early promise, however, MOOCs are still relatively unexplored and poorly understood. In a MOOC, each student's complete interaction with the course materials takes place on the Web, thus providing a record of learner activity of unprecedented scale and resolution. In this work, we use such trace data to develop a conceptual framework for understanding how users currently engage with MOOCs. We develop a taxonomy of individual behavior, examine the different behavioral patterns of high- and low-achieving students, and investigate how forum participation relates to other parts of the course. We also report on a large-scale deployment of badges as incentives for engagement in a MOOC, including randomized experiments in which the presentation of badges was varied across sub-populations. We find that making badges more salient produced increases in forum engagement.  In massive open online courses (MOOCs), peer grading serves as a critical tool for scaling the grading of complex, open-ended assignments to courses with tens or hundreds of thousands of students. But despite promising initial trials, it does not always deliver accurate results compared to human experts. In this paper, we develop algorithms for estimating and correcting for grader biases and reliabilities, showing significant improvement in peer grading accuracy on real data with 63,199 peer grades from Coursera's HCI course offerings --- the largest peer grading networks analysed to date. We relate grader biases and reliabilities to other student factors such as student engagement, performance as well as commenting style. We also show that our model can lead to more intelligent assignment of graders to gradees.