Are Learners Satisfied with Their MOOC Experiences? Assessing and Improving Online Learners’ Interactions

With the prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic, most students study remotely online, which can unleash the benefits of massive open online course (MOOC) platforms. MOOC platforms offer various advantages over traditional education. Still, it is inevitable that there still remain significant challenges that hamper the development and popularity of MOOCs. Interactions and collaborated learning remain as vital weaknesses. In this paper, we are interested in improving MOOC interactions by investigating learners’ experience with current popular MOOC platforms starting with a survey. We also conducted a task analysis on three popular MOOC platforms, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and Canvas, to analyze whether and how they include key interaction functions. We found that learner-instructor and teamwork interaction affect users’ experience most. Based on our findings, we propose a set of comprehensive guidelines, called IN-MOOC, to facilitate interpersonal interactions on MOOC platforms. In summary, IN-MOOC provides comprehensive and hierarchical guidelines to improve users’ experience via enhancing interpersonal interaction on MOOC platforms.