Commitment Threshold – On Student Retention in MOOCs

Learning and teaching at scale became especially topical and important matters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The obvious way to that end is to use Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). However, the pedagogics and student behaviour between online and classroom implementations are far from similar, and successful implementation of a MOOC requires an understanding of this. Typically, the dropout rates of MOOCs are pretty high. Most of the dropouts happen in the very early stages of the course. This paper studies how and when students commit to MOOC courses. For this study, we have selected four courses with different implementations from our extensive portfolio of MOOC courses at University of Helsinki. Based on the results, the students who complete the first two parts (or weeks) of a more prolonged course are usually quite committed to completing the entire course. The behaviour varies slightly between scheduled and unscheduled courses and between courses of different topics. The inner and outer motivations also play a role in commitment. Regardless, it seems that the authors of MOOCs should pay special attention to making the first steps as engaging as possible.