Impact of Course Delivery Mode on Learner Engagement in MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) generally have two modes of course delivery: the instructor-paced mode with multiple fixed deadlines to complete assessments or the self-paced mode with a final deadline when the course closes. Many MOOC platform providers have shifted from delivering courses in instructor-paced mode to self-paced mode, assuming that a longer, flexible schedule allows learners to better engage with and complete courses. Although this question of self-paced versus instructor-paced is not new, the answer is still relevant given that studies comparing the two course delivery modes of MOOCs provided mixed results and the pressure to run all MOOCs as self-paced. In this study, we took a deeper look into learner engagement differences between the two course delivery modes for one quantitative biology course and one computer programming course. Despite the differences in enrollment numbers and content, we found similar trends between both courses involving benefits to instructor-paced over self-paced delivery, especially when evaluating more engaged behaviors like posting to the discussion forum or submitting a problem answer. Interestingly, most completers finished the courses across 80-90% of the available days in an instructor-paced run. For self-paced runs, the median range of time a completer was active was less than one fifth of the time the course was open, but some completers did take advantage of finishing the course in a smaller or maximum window of time. We also found that most completers were active a similar total number of days in self-paced and instructor-paced course runs, despite having more days available in the self-paced runs and that the activity per day per completer was lower in self-paced delivery mode for both courses.