Students’ Satisfaction of a Design Thinking MOOC with Personalized Learning Objectives

Due to their openness and low barriers to enroll, most Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer free access to knowledge for almost everyone. This attracts a large number of learners, each with their own individual intentions and motivations to join a course. However, personal support and guidance can almost never be provided at this scale. All learners have to follow the same usually weekly structured content and the learning success is only measured by the achievement of a certificate. To overcome this one-size-fits-all approach with technical means, we introduced a tool for Personalized Learning Objectives. This enables learners to achieve more individual objectives in courses, follow different learning paths, and link their motivations and intentions to the definition of learning success. Previous studies have already examined, among other aspects, the usefulness, acceptance, and achievement rates of learning objectives in MOOCs. In this complimentary research, the satisfaction of students with and without a selected learning objective is compared in a course on topics from the field of Design Thinking.