Investigating Student's Problem-solving Approaches in MOOCs using Natural Language Processing

Problem-solving approaches are an essential part of learning. Knowing how students approach solving problems can help instructors improve their instructional designs and effectively guide the learning process of students. We propose a natural language processing (NLP) driven method to capture online learners’ problem-solving approaches at scale while using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as a learning platform. We employ an online survey to gather data, NLP techniques, and existing educational theories to investigate this in the lens of both computer science and education. The paper shows how NLP techniques, i.e. preprocessing, topic modeling, and text summarization, must be tuned to extract information from a large-scale text corpus. The proposed method discovered 18 problem-solving approaches from the text data, such as using pen and paper, peer learning, trial and error, etc. We also observed topics that appear over the years, such as clarifying code logic, watching videos, etc. We observed that students heavily rely on "tools" for solving programming problems and can expect that such selection of methods can vary depending on the type of task.