Measures of success

Varying intention and participation in MOOCs

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are widely understood to suffer from low completion rates, and this is taken as evidence that MOOCs are not living up to their promise. However, we argue that the common understanding of completion rates is misleading in the MOOC context because many of the registered participants are not actually students, in that they never intended to “complete” the course. We examine student participation in the light of declared intention in the Engaging India MOOC. We show the number of passing students is 28% of the number of registrants who intended to complete the course. We also show that a significant number of students completed the solitary assessments but did not complete assessment items that involved the discussion forum, with only 13% completing the final reflective piece. We conclude that a new understanding of completion is needed for the MOOC context and call for closer examination of the interplay between assessment type and student participation.