Online educational video engagement prediction based on dynamic graph neural networks
Authors: Ou Xiancheng , Chen Yuting , Zhou Siwei , Shi Jiandong 
Published: September 2023

Purpose

With the continuous growth of online education, the quality issue of online educational videos has become increasingly prominent, causing students in online learning to face the dilemma of knowledge confusion. The existing mechanisms for controlling the quality of online educational videos suffer from subjectivity and low timeliness. Monitoring the quality of online educational videos involves analyzing metadata features and log data, which is an important aspect. With the development of artificial intelligence technology, deep learning techniques with strong predictive capabilities can provide new methods for predicting the quality of online educational videos, effectively overcoming the shortcomings of existing methods. The purpose of this study is to find a deep neural network that can model the dynamic and static features of the video itself, as well as the relationships between videos, to achieve dynamic monitoring of the quality of online educational videos.

Design/methodology/approach

The quality of a video cannot be directly measured. According to previous research, the authors use engagement to represent the level of video quality. Engagement is the normalized participation time, which represents the degree to which learners tend to participate in the video. Based on existing public data sets, this study designs an online educational video engagement prediction model based on dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs). The model is trained based on the video’s static features and dynamic features generated after its release by constructing dynamic graph data. The model includes a spatiotemporal feature extraction layer composed of DGNNs, which can effectively extract the time and space features contained in the video's dynamic graph data. The trained model is used to predict the engagement level of learners with the video on day T after its release, thereby achieving dynamic monitoring of video quality.

Findings

Models with spatiotemporal feature extraction layers consisting of four types of DGNNs can accurately predict the engagement level of online educational videos. Of these, the model using the temporal graph convolutional neural network has the smallest prediction error. In dynamic graph construction, using cosine similarity and Euclidean distance functions with reasonable threshold settings can construct a structurally appropriate dynamic graph. In the training of this model, the amount of historical time series data used will affect the model’s predictive performance. The more historical time series data used, the smaller the prediction error of the trained model.

Research limitations/implications

A limitation of this study is that not all video data in the data set was used to construct the dynamic graph due to memory constraints. In addition, the DGNNs used in the spatiotemporal feature extraction layer are relatively conventional.

Originality/value

In this study, the authors propose an online educational video engagement prediction model based on DGNNs, which can achieve the dynamic monitoring of video quality. The model can be applied as part of a video quality monitoring mechanism for various online educational resource platforms.