Yesterday evening I had an email from a student six weeks into the course, saying that he’s not motivated and it’ll take five years to get the degree and he wants to drop out now.  How could I have predicted this?  Could my university, the OU, have predicted this?

This final week of the LAK12 MOOC involves joining a ning website for discussion around a presentation from Simon Buckingham-Shum on “Learning analytics: dream, nightmare or fairy dust?” SB-S says that the OU has been doing predictive modelling using probability models around

• student groups
• areas of curriculum
• study methods

These analytics support the OU around what’s going well.  If the OU has previous quality data, it is in a good position to identify patterns of success.

Institutionally the OU might know, but I didn’t know I was going to lose this student 🙁 and I’m his real human contact, so how could I have kept him? You can’t keep students who aren’t motivated.