SDA-Net: A Symmetric Dual-Attention Network with Multi-Scale Convolution for MOOC Dropout Prediction

With the rapid development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), high dropout rates have become a major challenge, limiting the quality of online education and the effectiveness of targeted interventions. Although existing MOOC dropout prediction methods have incorporated deep learning and attention mechanisms to improve predictive performance to some extent, they still face limitations in modeling differences in course difficulty and learning engagement, capturing multi-scale temporal learning behaviors, and controlling model complexity. To address these issues, this paper proposes a MOOC dropout prediction model that integrates multi-scale convolution with a symmetric dual-attention mechanism, termed SDA-Net. In the feature modeling stage, the model constructs a time allocation ratio matrix (MRatio), a resource utilization ratio matrix (SRatio), and a relative group-level ranking matrix (Rank) to characterize learners’ behavioral differences in terms of time investment, resource usage structure, and relative performance, thereby mitigating the impact of course difficulty and individual effort disparities on prediction outcomes. Structurally, SDA-Net extracts learning behavior features at different temporal scales through multi-scale convolution and incorporates a symmetric dual-attention mechanism composed of spatial and channel attention to adaptively focus on information highly correlated with dropout risk, enhancing feature representation while maintaining a relatively lightweight architecture. Experimental results on the KDD Cup 2015 and XuetangX public datasets demonstrate that SDA-Net achieves more competitive performance than traditional machine learning methods, mainstream deep learning models, and attention-based approaches on major evaluation metrics; in particular, it attains an accuracy of 93.7% on the KDD Cup 2015 dataset and achieves an absolute improvement of 0.2 percentage points in Accuracy and 0.4 percentage points in F1-Score on the XuetangX dataset, confirming that the proposed model effectively balances predictive performance and model complexity.