Time-on-Task Estimation with Log-Normal Mixture Model

Abstract

We describe a method of estimating a user's time-on-task in an online learning environment. The method is agnostic of the details of the user's mental activity and does not rely on any data except timestamps of user's interactions, accounting for individual user differences. The method is implemented in R (the code is open-source) and has been tested in the data from a large sample of HarvardX MOOCs.