Detecting Behavioral Trajectories in Continued Education Online Courses

Abstract

Continuing education online has been steadily increasing worldwide and its students' profiles tend to be different from those in other formal modalities. Hence, it is relevant to understand the behavior of these students along their course trajectories. In this work, we investigate a specialization online course involving hearing healthcare professionals (n=96), to discover different navigation strategies and the factors which may influence it. To that end, we applied sequence analysis techniques to interpret different navigation patterns and selected demographic covariables which may influence these behavioral trajectories. Three clusters were found, with subtle differences among them and three variables with greater predictive power: age, professional experience and region.