Impact of an Instructor's Personalized Email Intervention on Completion Rates in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

Abstract

Although Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are increasing in popularity, they have been subject to criticism due to the high dropout rate. This study examined the impact of an instructor's personalized email intervention on the rate of completion of a nine week course, which included seven weekly quizzes, and the rate of completion of the final exam. The participants, who took an Israeli noncredit academic MOOC on negotiation management, were randomly assigned to two groups. Treatment group participants (N = 576) who did not complete the weekly quiz received a tailored reminder by email from their instructor encouraging them to complete the quiz and offering them assistance in order to deal with the past week’s contents. The control group (N = 608) that did not complete the weekly quiz did not get any emails from the instructor. The impact of the intervention was measured in three different ways: the immediate-impact, the delayed-impact and a cumulative impact. The increase in quiz completion within a week after the instructor's email was defined as an immediate-impact. The increase in the completion of the next quiz was defined as a delayed impact. The increase in the final exam completion rates was defined as a cumulative impact. The results show that the weekly intervention had an immediate impact as well as a cumulative impact on the final exam completion rate. The results suggest that an instructor's acknowledgement and interest might increase learners' commitment to learning in a MOOC. This study aimed to gain insight into learners' propensity to stay active in a MOOC and to increase completion rates. Findings of this study can be useful to MOOC designers and instructors to design and facilitate more effective MOOCs for learners by using email interventions to prevent students from dropping out of courses.

El rol facilitador del docente en la formación online asíncrona y los resultados académicos: Un estudio exploratorio

“…Es evidente, y así lo dicen los estudios a los que hemos tenido acceso, que la cercanía del docente, elemento al que podemos conectar su percepción de cordialidad, es un componente clave para su integración y sensación de acogida (Glazier, 2016;Brown et al, 2020;Kurtz et al, 2022), aspectos que también fueron recogidos anteriormente en una investigación cualitativa en esta misma institución (Romero y Anzola, 2022). Como es posible desprender por las características de los datos obtenidos, solo es posible deducir que existen diferencias en esta percepción sobre la cordialidad y respeto que muestra el docente en la comunicación con el estudiante, y es posible asociar el menor valor de esta percepción con el grupo de asignaturas de más bajos resultados académicos.…”

“…Por último, nos parece de interés, que nuestra investigación arroja datos que corroboran lo señalado en estudios recientes respecto a la importancia de la implicación de los docentes online (Kurtz et al, 2022;Pinchbeck y Heaney, 2022). En esta exploración se identifica que los profesores que integran recursos adicionales al proceso formativo están obteniendo distintos resultados en los cursos que dictan.…”

“…Se ha comprobado que el reconocimiento y el interés de un docente aumenta el compromiso de los alumnos con el aprendizaje (Kurtz et al, 2022), su relevancia para apoyar el trabajo en grupo y fomentar la comprensión profunda a través de la participación (Annese et al, 2022), y su impacto en la motivación y la autonomía de los estudiantes (Tan et al, 2021). Se le atribuye ser clave para influir en la retención y participación de los estudiantes en los foros (Pinchbeck y Heaney, 2022).…”

An early warning system to identify and intervene online dropout learners

“…According to (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), nudges are an effective way to influence individuals' behavior and decisions, and different intervention systems have been developed using such an approach. Authors in (Kurtz et al, 2022) proposed a nudging intervention system when a learner did not submit a quiz for helping to improve self-regulation and self-efficacy, and justin-time interventions were proposed in (Teusner et al, 2018) focusing on motivating learners. Interventions do not always positively impact learners (Borrella et al, 2019).…”

“…Cognitive, outcome and process-oriented feedback can only be given when an activity has been assessed. Some methodologies are based on such types of feedback (Kurtz et al, 2022;Teusner et al, 2018). However, the intervention arrives too late when the dropout is materialized.…”