Mini Survival Kit: Prediction based recommender to help students escape their critical situation in online courses

The poster focuses on a recommender method that is tightly related to predictive learning analytics in distance higher education focused on the identification of students at risk of not submitting their assignments and subsequently failing their courses. Given a lack of student time to the assignment deadline, the method aims to provide a minimalistic recommendation for students to increase their chances of submitting the assignment so that they survive a possible difficulty they encounter. We formally define the task as an optimisation problem and propose a simple algorithm that will serve as a baseline for further improvement. On an offline evaluation on one STEM course, taking only students predicted as at-risk, those that followed the recommendations were associated with higher submission rates than if they only accessed any online resource.