Clustering MOOC Programming Solutions to Diversify Their Presentation to Students

Elizaveta Artser, Anastasiia Birillo, Yaroslav Golubev, Maria Tigina, Hieke Keuning, Nikolay Vyahhi, and Timofey Bryksin

November, 2024. Published in the proceedings of Koli Calling (—).

Abstract. In many MOOCs, whenever a student completes a programming task, they can see previous solutions of other students to find potentially different ways of solving the problem and to learn new coding constructs. However, a lot of MOOCs simply show the most recent solutions, disregarding their diversity or quality, and thus hindering the students' opportunity to learn.

In this work, we explore this novel problem for the first time. To solve it, we adapted the existing plagiarism detection tool JPlag to Python submissions on Hyperskill, a popular MOOC platform. However, due to the tool's inner algorithm, JPLag fully processed only 46 out of 867 studied tasks. Therefore, we developed our own tool called Rhubarb. This tool first standardizes solutions that are algorithmically the same, then calculates the structure-aware edit distance between them, and then applies clustering. Finally, it selects one example from each of the largest clusters, thus ensuring their diversity. Rhubarb was able to handle all 867 tasks successfully.

We compared different approaches on a set of 59 real-life tasks that both tools could process. Eight experts rated the selected solutions based on diversity, code quality, and usefulness. The default platform approach of simply selecting recent submissions received on average 3.12 out of 5, JPlag - 3.77, Rhubarb - 3.50. To ensure both quality and coverage, we created a system that combines both tools. We conclude our work by discussing the future of this new problem and the research needed to solve it better.