PurposeWith the increasing popularity of online courses, their quality has become a public concern. Based on the perspective of knowledge management, this study aims to identify comprehensive and granular quality factors of online courses and analyze the relationships between the factors.Design/methodology/approachFollowing the principles of the grounded theory, interpretive structural modeling and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis methods, this research uses reviews and comments garnered from Zhihu, which is the most popular online question-and-answer community in China, to conduct the analysis.FindingsBased on the text data, 50 factors that potentially affect the quality of online courses are obtained. The analysis identifies the hierarchical relationships and dependent correlations between the factors.Originality/valueThe research uses the knowledge transformation model to classify content elements according to their degree of descriptiveness and provides practical and effective suggestions for improving the quality of online courses.

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This study investigates the impact of psychological stimuli on students’ continuance intention to use massive open online courses (MOOCs), through the mediation effects of emotions under a stimulus-organism-response framework. Perceived competition, perceived risk, and curiosity are the psychological stimuli. Four emotions (happiness, interest, sadness, and anxiety), enjoyment, and stress are considered as the organism. Continuance intention to use MOOCs for learning is the response. To test the hypotheses empirically, 574 valid responses were collected from individuals who claimed that they had learning experience on the Chinese University MOOC. This is a well-known, official online learning platform supported by the Chinese Education Ministry and has the largest number of active MOOC users in China. The study employs partial least squares structural equation modeling to validate the research model. The results show that perceived competition has both positive and negative effects, perceived risk has no significant effect, curiosity only has a beneficial effect, and the four emotions play important mediation roles. This research unveils the internal effect mechanisms of psychological factors and emotions on continuance intention in the context of online learning.

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