title: An investigation into participant engagement in Massive Open Online Courses
Creators: name: Nazir, Usman
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2023

description: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) carry considerable potential to educate those who 
cannot afford formal education, however low retention rates still haunt MOOC providers –
with only five percent of users completing existing courses (Jordan, 2014). Since MOOCs are 
open to all, MOOC participants have varying intentions; including users who join to complete 
the course and those who do not. Therefore, it is important to learn how to facilitate a willing 
learner to continue and complete the course. Hence, engaging strategies must be implemented
for a willing learner to meet the learning objectives on MOOC. Accordingly, this study 
investigates the retention element of MOOC, to understand the reasons for low completion, 
and proposes strategies of how students can be encouraged to engage and/or continue using the 
MOOC to completion.
This research is organised in a series of chapters to provide a comprehensive understanding of 
student behaviour. chapter 1 and chapter 2 focus on understanding and defining the issue 
through reviewing existing literature. Chapter 3 explains the methodology used to address the 
problem. Chapter 4 explores when the users are most likely to leave the course and reasons for 
it. The findings reveal that the highest number of people leave on the very first day of a course.
The main reasons identified highlight gaps in literature linked to i) a lack of response on the 
MOOC forums, and ii) a change in user intention to continue or leave a MOOC. Subsequently, 
Chapter 5 delves deeper into exploring these reasons in the form of studying behavioural 
patterns of users on forums who complete or not complete the course, and Chapter 6 
investigates the reasons for change in user intention to continue with the course. 
The findings of the study on forum activity (chapter 5) confirms that not all finishers leave 
comments on the forum, however most of the comments on the forums are from course 
graduates. Accordingly, forum activity on MOOCs shows that the completers post the most 
responses on the forum, and answer rather than initiate queries. Hence, strategies that 
encourage greater individual participation in the forums would support user engagement and 
continuance. The qualitative study on the reasons for change in continuance intention of users 
(chapter 6) identified several key factors, which were then compared with the existing literature 
to ascertain contribution to the list of factors of course continuance intentions of the users -
taking breaks in between the course and ease of leaving the course were discovered as two such 
factors. Chapter 7 then conducts a validation study to ascertain the significance of these two 
factors. It is found that taking breaks in between the course is not significantly related to leaving 
the course earlier than intended, whereas ease of leaving the course is significantly related to 
making the willing participant to leave the course earlier than intended. Based on these findings,
the study proposes corresponding strategies to improve user engagement such that a willing 
user continues using MOOC.
Finally, Chapter 8 provides a concise research summary, addresses limitations and discusses 
future research possibilities. It also highlights the theoretical and practical contributions made 
by the study. The theoretical contributions of this study include uncovering and validating an 
extensive list of reasons on why a MOOC participant leaves earlier or stays longer than 
intended. It also adds to the knowledge bank in the field by utilising the ECM model and 
highlighting the importance of ease of leaving a MOOC as an important factor that can impact 
participant intention to continue with the course. The practical contributions of this study offer
valuable insights and actionable strategies to MOOC providers in order to get a willing learner
to engage and continue using the course, which can translate into better reputation and financial 
returns. Some of the strategies are: providing timely feedback, a well-designed intro of the 
course, encouraging and providing opportunities for participants to interactions on MOOC,
using a reward system such as certificates and badges to keep the participant engaged and 
motivated to continue using the course.