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Zipf's law in MOOC learning behavior

Learners participating in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have a wide range of backgrounds and motivations. Many MOOC learners sign up the courses to take a brief look; only a few go through the entire content, and even fewer are able to eventually obtain a certificate. We discovered this phenomenon after having examined 76 courses on the xuetangX platform. More specifically, we found that in many courses the learning coverage — one of the metrics used to estimate the learners' active engagement with the online courses — observes a Zipf distribution. We apply the maximum likelihood estimation method to fit the Zipf's law and test our hypothesis using a chi-square test. The result from our study is expected to bring insight to the unique learning behavior on MOOC and thus help improve the effectiveness of MOOC learning platforms and the design of courses.