Literature review

Participation in automatically graded activities

 A recent study (Monllau Olivé  D et al, 2019) exploring the creation of analytics frameworks for predicting student drop-out used anonymised datasets from eight Learn Moodle Basics MOOCs. The authors, including Moodle HQ's Lead Data Scientist, identified performance in the automatically graded quizzes as a predictor of future success. The MOOC has a quiz each week on the course materials with the  final quiz in the fourth week being a summative assessment with a pass mark of 70%. The authors discovered that:

"The indicators The student attempted at least one quiz and Percentage of quizzes attempted in the course {...] have a strong correlation to course drop outs."

The authors speculated that those participants interested in testing their knowledge each week are perhaps those most motivated to complete the course.

Another indicator "The student failed a quiz attempt" was less significant. From my experience running the Learn Moodle MOOC, I would suggest this is because the participants are allowed to retake quizzes as often as they wish, so  they are aware they can constantly improve.

The authors did not differentiate between 'All at once' participants and 'Step by step' participants in their research, so this is a question still to be answered.