Analyzing Pre-Existing Knowledge and Performance in a Programming MOOC

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are accessible to anyone with a device that can connect to the internet. MOOCs aim to increase the accessibility of higher-level knowledge and skills, such as programming. To understand how students are performing and struggling in the course, we investigate a popular MITx MOOC that teaches introductory programming. We look at problem set questions and examine students with different levels of pre-existing knowledge. Specifically, we study the number of attempts of each group per question and the mean final accuracy of each group per question. We find that for nearly all questions, students with no programming experience struggle more than students with prior programming experience. Moreover, we observe a potential turning point in the course where students of all experience levels begin to struggle. Our findings both show that two groups of MOOC students perform differently and inform question design in MOOCs by demonstrating which question types are particularly arduous.