University Online Courses: Correlation between Students' Participation Rate and Academic Performance

It has been generally believed that higher participation in discussion forums in online classes would result in better student performance. To better understand this correlation on a large scale, we have studied 291 distinct online courses offered during Summer 2019 at Georgia Gwinnett College. Several studies in the literature have focused on analyzing the data from the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). However, in this research, we have focused on University-based Online Courses (UOCs) for undergraduate students, where the curriculum enforces students to take these courses. Although a higher participation rate in online forums has a direct correlation with a higher grade in MOOCs, in OUCs, students with top grades are not necessarily the most active students. Our analysis shows a consistent pattern in UOCs where during the first two-thirds of the semester, students who belong to the GPA range of ~70 to ~80 percentile of the class have the highest rate of participation, while during the last one-third of the semester, the ones who belong to the GPA range of ~87 to ~93 percentile, contribute the most. On the other hand, we found out that the common characteristic of top students in all classes, is their consistency in participation throughout the semester, regardless of the number of their posts.