Monitoring Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The last two years have been characterized by an exponential growth in the use of the Internet as a working and learning tool, due to the “Covid-19” pandemic. The increase in smart working and distance learning have been some of the most striking effects. Cities have become more eco-sustainable: less pollution and better life quality. In this work we present a brief review of some data science platforms, which are useful to monitor the learning processes that take place in Massive Open Online Courses. Through these tools, teachers could find out useful information about the learning processes, by extracting it from the (big) data produced by students’ activities and stored in log files. To show the usefulness of such tools, we propose a very simple case study, showing how to extract strategic information from the log database produced by a course delivered via Moodle platform. The results of this case study strengthen our hypothesis on the utility of a data science approach for monitoring learning processes, especially in MOOCs.