Founder, Stepic
Director, Bioinformatics Institute

Nikolay graduated Saint-Petersburg State University, specializing in system programming. He is actively involved in educational projects: Nikolay is (co-)founder of GameChangers, Bioinformatics Institute, Rosalind, and Stepic — non-commercial project to create online constructor and platform for free lessons and courses. Stepic’s testing system is currently used on several of Coursera’s courses. Its’ platform is also used for programming 101 courses of Computer Science Center.

Data and Analytics in Online Education

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Last years the massive online courses became very popular, characterized by large amount of students, low entry point, simple scalability due to automated tests checking, and low percentage of those who finishes them.

Online education is still in the early stages of development, mostly copying existing traditional university courses. Nevertheless, the conceptual difference is in the diversity of studying process data and the simplicity of collecting it. As a result it becomes possible to optimize and personalize the process using the data in question, thus significantly increasing efficiency. Similar methods are already used in the web-search, news industry, and social networks, but are underrepresented in the education due to its’ conservatism and lack of formal metrics of education quality.

The presentation will be dedicated to the main data types of user behaviour, collected by massive online education platforms, including watching of video lessons, problem solving, and discussion of materials. We will also show how this data can help to reveal some controversial materials which require improvements, and talk about perspectives of online courses personalization.