From Learners to Earners: Enabling MOOC Learners to Apply Their Skills and Earn Money in an Online Market Place

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) aim to
educate the world
. More often than not, however, MOOCs fall short of this goala majority of learners are already highly educated (with a Bachelors degree or more) and come from specific parts of the (developed) world. Learners from developing countries without a higher degree are underrepresented, though desired, in MOOCs. One reason for those learners to drop out of a course can be found in their financial realities and the subsequent limited amount of time they can dedicate to a course besides earning a living. If we could
pay
learners to take a MOOC, this hurdle would largely disappear. With MOOCS, this leads to the following fundamental challenge: How can learners be
paid at scale
? Ultimately, we envision a recommendation engine that recommends tasks from online market places such as
Upwork
or
witmart
to learners, that are relevant to the course content of the MOOC. In this manner, the learners learn
and
earn money. To investigate the feasibility of this vision, in this paper, we explored to what extent (1) online market places contain tasks relevant to a specific MOOC, and (2) learners are able to solve real-world tasks correctly and with sufficient quality. Finally, based on our experimental design, we were also able to investigate the impact of real-world
bonus
tasks in a MOOC on the general learner population.