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TopRationale
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a rapidly growing mode of education, holding the potential to open up access to world-class teaching and educational resources outside geographical and social boundaries. In MOOCs, there is a variety of motivations among learners who use MOOCs as a result of the open nature of MOOCs, which allows anyone to participate (Kizilcec, R.F, Piech, & Schneider, 2013). (Shah, 2019) reported that in 2019 there were around 2,500 courses offered by MOOCs provider while the total number of learners registered in MOOCs reached 110 million excluding China butcourse completion ratio is very low (O'Malley, 2019). (Hart, 2012) revealed that learners’ motivation was one of the most important components of persistence in online learning environments (Barak, Watted, & Haick, 2016) defined motivation as “a reason or a goal a person has for behaving in a given manner in a given situation”. Investigating such motivations offers insights for MOOCs providers into the potential solutions for improving their services to increase learners’ engagement, satisfaction, completion rate, as well as meet their needs and requirements. The basic objectives of this research are to present a broad and systematic review of the literature related to this topic to highlight the current research directions and gaps that can be addressed in the future, and to explore the factors which affect MOOC completion/learner retention as it is an important measure of MOOC success.
To address the gaps in the literature,the following research questions (RQ) are posed:
RQ1: How many research papers are introduced in various publications related to learners’ retention? How can these papers be classified?
RQ2: What data collection methods and techniques have been used by the researchers?
RQ3: What are the key motivational factors that characterise MOOC learners?
RQ4: What platform and geographic distribution of participants was selected during the data collection stages in the related literature?
RQ5: Is there any important motivational factor which is still not explored in the research?
Top(Hew & Cheung, 2014) aimed to identify the learners’ and instructors’ motivations and challenges of using MOOCs. (Latha & Malarmathi, 2016) examined the factors influencing learners to complete MOOCs. This section summarises previous literature synthesis that was focused on identifying the motivational factors affecting learner’s intention to use MOOCs. The literature has been examined based on different research questions. Table 1 presents the detailed literature review of the research papers which are related to research questions presented in the previous section.