Surveying the motivations of groups of learners in highly-technical STEM MOOCs

Highly technical STEM MOOCs have recently become widely available, but little is known about the motivations of the various groups of learners participating. In this work, we perform a detailed survey of 1,624 learners to examine their motivations in detail. These learners exhibited overall high levels of intrinsic motivation, but varied in their extrinsic motivation, according to their current position as students, workers, or unemployed individuals. Students generally reported the highest levels of extrinsic motivation compared to other groups (p<;0.001). The results from this analysis indicate that additional factors about learners in each group, such as their course participation and performance, should be examined in future work to help better understand the various needs of those enrolling in highly technical STEM MOOCs.