Designing and delivering MOOCs to motivate participants for self-directed learning

Figures & data

Table 1. The loading of the motivation factor (n = 198, with PAF extraction and promax rotation)

Item	Factor 1
Q16	0.643
Q17	0.617
Q18	0.676
Q19	0.655
Q20	0.474
Q21	0.658
Q22	0.617

Table 2. Mean score and standard deviation of the specific motivation strategies that the participants’ MOOC facilitated

Items	Mean	SD
1. Motivates students to learn new information	4.32	0.64
2. Helps the student embrace a learning challenge	4.10	0.70
3. Helps the student critically evaluate new ideas	4.08	0.75
4. Helps the student seek deeper reasons for the facts	3.90	0.90
5. Helps the student learn from his/her mistakes	3.83	0.80
6. Supports the student’s willingness to seek different ways to solve difficult problems	3.79	0.84
7. Helps the student develop a need to learn	3.74	0.83

Table 3. MOOCs’ instructors’ strategies to motivate learners

Motivation	Strategies	Quotations
Entering motivation	Identify the value of and need for learning	One way that we motivate students is, at least for our topic, we have a lot of things, where we talk about why school change is important or why school innovation is important. (Ashley)
	Increase self-efficacy	If they know that each item of content is quite small, they are more motivated to think: ‘while I’m on the train on the way to work, I can watch a video and read an article.’ And they can have some sense of the piece of content that has been ticked off and achieved. (Emily)
	Incentives	One of the things is the TESOL certificate. It’s kind of the carrot at the end of the course, as a huge motivator. (Logan)
Task motivation	Instruction	We made a lot of jokes. It was an easy atmosphere. (Paul) We encouraged students to step away from the computer and try experiments in certain ways, interview someone about a course topic. One of our strategies is getting people away from the computer and trying stuff in their classrooms and schools. (Ashley)
	Learning materials	The quality of the video that they produced is really good. And everybody looks very good. And again, I think that’s more motivating, particularly with MOOCs. (Emily)
	Feedback	I gave little quizzes at the end of my videos, but they tended to be just on that video. They were short: three to five questions … I think it actually encourages people and gives them more and more positive feedback. (Lucas)
	Social interaction	FutureLearn has integrated more sorts of social features so that teachers can follow the students on the program. You can very quickly click ‘like’ buttons. You don’t have the time to individually write messages to them all. You can quickly give them some sense of the teacher ‘likes’ my post, whatever. And I still think those kinds of things are all quite important in motivating people to keep going and staying with courses like MOOCs. (Emily)

Figure 1. Example list of short videos in MOOCs.

Figure 2. Example of an offer to obtain a certificate for students.

Figure 3. Example of a progress indicator.

Figure 4. Example of a peer-assessment component.

Figure 5. Interactive opinion map.