crsra: A learning analytics tool for understanding student behaviour in massive open online courses

Due to the fundamental differences between traditional education and massive open online courses (MOOCs), and because of the ever-increasing popularity of the latter, more research is needed to understand current and future trends in MOOCs. Although research in the field has grown rapidly in recent years, one of the main challenges facing researchers remains the complexity and messiness of the data. Therefore, it is imperative to provide tools that pave the way for more research on this new subject. This paper introduces a package called crsra based on the statistical software R to help tidy and perform preliminary analysis on massive loads of data provided by Coursera. The advantages of the package are as follows: (a) faster loading and organizing of data for analysis, (b) an efficient method for combining data from multiple courses and even from across institutions, and (c) provision of a set of functions for analyzing student behaviours.