Dropout: MOOC participants’perspective

Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Parslow, P. and Williams, S. (2014) Dropout: MOOC participants’perspective. In: EMOOCs 2014, the Second MOOC European Stakeholders Summit, 10-12 th February 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland, pp. 95-100.

Abstract/Summary

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) open up learning opportunities to a large number of people. A small percentage (around 10%) of the large numbers of participants enrolling in MOOCs manage to finish the course by completing all parts. The term ‘dropout’ is commonly used to refer to ‘all who failed to complete’ a course, and is used in relation to MOOCs. Due to the nature of MOOCs, with students not paying enrolment and tuition fees, there is no direct financial cost incurred by a student. Therefore it is debatable whether the traditional definition of dropout in higher education could be directly applied to MOOCs. This paper reports ongoing exploratory work on MOOC participants’ perspectives based on six qualitative interviews. The findings show that MOOC participants are challenging the widely held view of dropout, suggesting that it is more about failing to achieve their personal aims.

Item Type	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/36002
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Computer Science
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