Open and Distance Education/Distance learners and learner support/1. MOOC Learners

MOOCs are online courses which are available to anyone who has Internet access (Jivet, 2016). By 2015, there are over 35 million learners who registered at least one MOOC (Shah, 2016). According to Guo & Reinecke (as cited in Bayeck, 2016), MOOC learners have different cultural background, online experience, educational level, motivations, and participation to attend a MOOC.

Who are the MOOC learners

Christensen et al. (2013) reported: “MOOC students have very high levels of educational attainment: 83.0% of students have a post-secondary degree (2 or 4 years), 79.4% of students have a Bachelor’s degree or higher and 44.2% report education beyond a Bachelor’s degree.” Despujol et al. (2014) showed 56% of participants are male while 44% are female in their study. 62.4% participant have a job, and 13% are unemployed or retired (Christensen et al., 2013). The United States, India, and the United Kingdom are the first three countries with the most substantial number of registration in the edX first-year report (Ho et al., 2014). People having college degree benefit the most from MOOCs (Dillahunt et al., 2014). Unfortunately, MOOCs cannot give support to underprivileged students from developing countries (Kalman, 2014).

Motivation of MOOC learners

In MOOCs, motivation plays a critical part in how learners participate and complete the course (Kizilcec & Halawa, 2015). A sufficiently motivated learner can overcome the stress of study and use appropriate skills to be an independent learner (Simpson, 2008). Zheng et al. (2015) identified four categories of student motivations to attend a MOOC. First one is fulfilling current needs. Students who had pressure to finish school courses would choose a MOOC to help them to understand the school course content quickly. Or students desired to learn more because school courses could not meet their needs. The second one is learning for the future. Some individuals choose to learn MOOCs because they have strong wills to promoting their future employability. The third one is personal interest. Students’ curious about MOOC intrigue them to follow the open courses. The last motivation is connecting with people. Looking for peers with common interests is the last motivation to let students enroll in the MOOCs.

Participation and Self-autonomy of MOOC Learners

In the recent years, most popular MOOC courses’ successful rate showed that a lot of learners quit the course only after several weeks’ study (Rai & Chunrao, 2016). Regarding Katy Jordan’s data (as cited in Rai & Chunrao, 2016), MOOCs average completion rate is lower than 7%. In another research, only 5 % students got a certificate during 841,687 students who enrolled Harvard and MIT course (Bruyn, 2014). In all, the High drop-out rate is a challenge for all MOOC providers (Chea, 2010). In the other hand, for students, they felt disappointed when they did not finish one MOOC even they retook it several times (Zheng et al., 2015). Zheng et al. (2015) conclude eight factors related to the retention problem: MOOCs required much more time than they initially expected; course contents were too difficult to follow; lacked the time to continue the course because of some other things; laced the pressure to complete a free course; had no sense of community; met negative social influence; needed to wait for a long time to enroll the course after registration; quit the course once they had learned what they wanted to learn.

Completing a MOOC demands a high level of learners’ self-autonomy to keep their motivation high (Jivet, 2016). According to the empirical research, learners with higher educational background were good at self-regulated learning (SRL) (Zimmerman, 1989) skills to have high rates of completion (Guo & Reinecke, 2014). So, promoting SRL ability is an effective way to enhance learners’ participation in the course. Also, MOOC Providers are responsible for creating tools to support the learner's study, rather than only as storage of knowledge (Jivet, 2016).