The impact of flow, satisfaction and reputation on loyalty to MOOCs: the moderating role of extrinsic motivation

ABSTRACT

Loyalty – users’ commitment to an institution or resource, involving its repeated use and recommending its use to others – and its explaining factors are of paramount importance in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), where participation is open and many actors with differing interests coexist. The present article tests a loyalty formation model by using satisfaction, flow state and reputation as explanatory factors. It also examines the role of extrinsic motivation (EM) as a potential moderator of inter-variable relationships. Data were gathered from questionnaires distributed to users of a MOOC offered by the University of Granada (Spain). Results indicate that EM plays an important moderating role in loyalty formation. Satisfaction, enjoyment and reputation are less important when EM is higher, whilst control appears to be more relevant to externally driven users. Practical implications include the recommendation to personalise users’ learning experience with different types of motivation in order to increase loyalty.

KEYWORDS:

• MOOCs
• loyalty
• satisfaction
• flow
• student motivation

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the help of the Resource Production Centre for the Digital University (CEPRUD) of the University of Granada for providing access to the MOOC database.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. However, the lack of formal certificates is also considered a disadvantage of MOOCs in comparison with other forms of training (Castaño-Muñoz et al., 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

José Luis Arquero

Dr José Luis Arquero is a Senior Lecturer in Accounting at the University of Seville (Spain). He has published extensively on accounting education in international journals and is currently the editor of the Spanish Journal of Accounting, Finance and Management Education.

Esteban Romero-Frías

Dr Esteban Romero-Frías is Associate Professor of the Department of Financial Economics and Accounting at the University of Granada and Director of Medialab UGR – Research Laboratory for Digital Culture and Society, within the Vice-Rectorate for Research and Transfer of the University of Granada. He has published research works in prestigious journals in Education (i.e. Comunicar) and Information Science (i.e. Scientometrics, JASIST, JIS).

Salvador Del Barrio-García

Dr Salvador Del Barrio-García is Full Professor of Marketing and Market Research Department at the University of Granada. His research is focused in areas such as Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC), Online Consumer Behaviour and Cross-cultural Marketing. He has published various peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals such as Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, among others.