Abstract:

It is generally assumed that an increase in popularity of online learning poses certain challenges to educators and makes them consider possible ways of sustainable development of MOOCs. The goal of this research is to contribute to improving MOOCs designing so that online courses expose more people to tremendous learning opportunities irrespective of current situation of social inequality.

The main idea of this article is to establish valid metrics for MOOC effectiveness. It is suggested that not only quantitative metrics, but also qualitative metrics are to be used. This work is mainly based on statistics to add up to the ongoing debate within the educational technology community about the success of MOOC as an advanced educational tool.

While in traditional educational settings completion rate is still regarded as an ultimate success metric for a course, and teachers are supposed to encourage their students to carefully study all the content and do all assignments to complete the course, recently there has been considerable controversy using this metric for measuring MOOCs effectiveness. The conclusion of the research fully supports the idea that completion rate only reflect the extent to which all students were involved in watching video content and completed all assignments of a MOOC. This assumption is primarily based on the idea that course completion rate is no longer adequate, as it doesn’t take the evolving needs of students into account.

Today, when students are no longer considered to be largely passive consumers of content, the research findings are meant to make MOOCs more exciting and meaningful experience.

Keywords:

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), enrollment intentions, personal intentions (goals), MOOC effectiveness, quantitative metrics, qualitative metrics.