Tobias Rohloff
Dominic Sauer
ABSTRACT
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide the opportunity to offer free and open education at scale. Thousands of students with different social and cultural backgrounds from all over the world can enroll for a course. This diverse audience comes with varying motivations and intentions from their personal or professional life. However, course instructors cannot offer individual support and guidance at this scale and therefore usually provide a one-size-fits-all approach. Students have to follow weekly-structured courses and their success is measured with the achievement of a certificate at the end. To better address the varying learning needs, technical support for goal-oriented and self-regulated learning is desired but very limited to date. Both learning strategies are proven to be key factors for students' achievement in large-scale online learning environments. Therefore, this paper presents a continuative study of personalized learning objectives in MOOCs to encourage goal-oriented and self-regulated learning. Based on the previously well-perceived acceptance and usefulness of the concept of personalized learning objectives, this study examines which learners select an objective and how successful they complete objectives. Concerning the learners' socio-demographic and geographical background, we could not identify any practical significant difference between students with selected learning objectives and the total course population. However, we have identified promising objective achievement rates, and we have observed a practical significant improvement of the certification rates comparing the total course population and students who selected an objective that included a graded certificate. This has also demonstrated a method for calculating more reasonable completion rates in MOOCs.
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Index Terms
- Students' Achievement of Personalized Learning Objectives in MOOCs
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On the Acceptance and Usefulness of Personalized Learning Objectives in MOOCs
L@S '19: Proceedings of the Sixth (2019) ACM Conference on Learning @ ScaleWith Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) the number of people having access to higher education increased rapidly. The intentions to enroll for a specific course vary significantly and depend on one's professional or personal learning needs and ...
Towards Personalized Learning Objectives in MOOCs
Lifelong Technology-Enhanced LearningAbstractInstead of measuring success in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) based on certification and completion-rates, researchers started to define success with alternative metrics recently, for example by evaluating the intention-behavior gap and goal ...
Context counts
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) require individual learners to self-regulate their own learning, determining when, how and with what content and activities they engage. However, MOOCs attract a diverse range of learners, from a variety of learning ...
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