Engaging with massive online courses

The Web has enabled one of the most visible recent developments in education—the deployment of massive open online courses. With their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning. De-spite this early promise, however, MOOCs are still relatively unex-plored and poorly understood. In a MOOC, each student’s complete interaction with the course materials takes place on the Web, thus providing a record of learner activity of unprecedented scale and resolution. In this work, we use such trace data to develop a conceptual framework for under-standing how users currently engage with MOOCs. We develop a taxonomy of individual behavior, examine the different behavioral patterns of high- and low-achieving students, and investigate how forum participation relates to other parts of the course. We also report on a large-scale deployment of badges as incen-tives for engagement in a MOOC, including randomized experi-ments in which the presentation of badges was varied across sub-populations. We find that making badges more salient produced increases in forum engagement