Students' Achievement of Personalized Learning Objectives in MOOCs

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide the opportunity to offer free and open education at scale. Thousands of students with different social and cultural backgrounds from all over the world can enroll for a course. This diverse audience comes with varying motivations and intentions from their personal or professional life. However, course instructors cannot offer individual support and guidance at this scale and therefore usually provide a one-size-fits-all approach. Students have to follow weekly-structured courses and their success is measured with the achievement of a certificate at the end. To better address the varying learning needs, technical support for goal-oriented and self-regulated learning is desired but very limited to date. Both learning strategies are proven to be key factors for students' achievement in large-scale online learning environments. Therefore, this paper presents a continuative study of personalized learning objectives in MOOCs to encourage goal-oriented and self-regulated learning. Based on the previously well-perceived acceptance and usefulness of the concept of personalized learning objectives, this study examines which learners select an objective and how successful they complete objectives. Concerning the learners' socio-demographic and geographical background, we could not identify any practical significant difference between students with selected learning objectives and the total course population. However, we have identified promising objective achievement rates, and we have observed a practical significant improvement of the certification rates comparing the total course population and students who selected an objective that included a graded certificate. This has also demonstrated a method for calculating more reasonable completion rates in MOOCs.