Online educational platforms increasingly allow learners to consume content at their own pace with on-demand formats, in contrast to the synchronous content of traditional education. Thus, it is important to understand and model learner engagement within these environments. Using data from four business courses hosted on Coursera, we model learner behavior as a two-stage decision process, with the first stage determining across-day continuation versus quitting and the second stage determining within-day choices among lectures, quizzes, and breaks. By modeling the heterogeneity across learners pursuing lecture and quiz completion goals, we capture different patterns of consumption that correspond to extant theories of goal progress within an empirical field setting. We find that most individuals exhibit a learning style where lecture utility changes as an inverted-U-shaped function of current progress. Our model may also be used as an early detection system to anticipate changes in engagement and allows us to relate learning styles to final performance outcomes and enrollment in additional courses. Finally, we examine the role of quizzes in how consumption patterns vary across learners in different courses and between those who have paid or not paid for the option to earn a course certificate.

与传统教育的同步内容相比，在线教育平台越来越允许学习者以点播格式按自己的节奏消费内容。因此，重要的是要了解和建模学习者在这些环境中的参与度。利用Coursera上托管的四门商务课程的数据，我们将学习者行为建模为一个两阶段的决策过程，第一阶段确定全天的继续学习与退出，而第二阶段确定在一天中的讲座，测验和休息之间的选择。通过对追求演讲和测验完成目标的学习者的异质性进行建模，我们捕获了与经验领域中现有目标进度理论相对应的不同消费模式。我们发现大多数人都表现出一种学习风格，其中演讲效用随着当前进度的倒U形变化而改变。我们的模型还可以用作早期检测系统，以预测参与度的变化，并使我们能够将学习风格与最终绩效结果和其他课程的入学联系起来。最后，我们研究了测验在不同课程的学习者之间以及在为获得课程证书的选择付费或不付费的学习者之间的消费方式变化方面的作用。