Understanding learners' persistence and engagement in Massive Open Online Courses: a critical review for Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses are a model which has become one of the major investment and development initiatives taken by the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) in the area of Open Education Resources (OER). Despite a lack of research into its effectiveness and assessment of its outcomes, many educational institutions have been competing with each other to implement and deliver the courses in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). With the exponential growth of online learning courses in MOOCs, varieties of subjects can now be studied by anyone, for free. Even though MOOCs have attracted an abundance of learners to enroll, yet many have withdrawn from the courses, causing a great concern for MOOCs developers. MOOCs learners' engagement has been suggested as one of the greatest weaknesses in online education, which causes high dropout rates in history, making it a worldwide issue that has not been tackled. Accordingly, the purpose of this research was to examine learners' persistence and engagement in MOOCs. The researchers utilized the data logging features of the OpenLearning platform to document seven online courses created by Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The descriptive data revealed a high number of incomplete tasks and a low number of viewed contents, indicating poor user participation. The results of the descriptive study would be used to improve the MOOCs model.