Abstract
In recent years Online Education has emerged as a complementary medium of education for students from all over the world. Though online education has seen a rise in popularity, there are still problems to be solved, such as high dropout rates. This articles reviews studies that address the problems of predicting student performance, motivation and related concepts in the context of online education. The article provides some reviews of works on student motivation, as it plays a major role in high dropout rates. Apart of reviewing the prominent works in this field, the current paper proposed new directions of research that could shed more light into the problems in this research field.