Students’ patterns of engagement and course performance in a Massive Open Online Course

A series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the Curriculum and Instruction (CUIN) Department at a university are collaboratively being designed and developed by a team of doctoral students with mentorship from two CUIN professors. The first two MOOCs, Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Digital Storytelling MOOC (DS MOOC) and Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Web 2.0 Tools, have been developed and offered multiple times on the Coursera platform. This paper reports on the relationships between learners' patterns and motives of engagement and their prior subject knowledge with their course performance in the Digital Storytelling MOOC. Results from this study indicate that learners who demonstrated active engagement in the MOOC tended to outperform other learners who did not practice this trait. Learners whose motives for participation involved earning the Continuing Professional Development certificate, gaining skills, ideas and inspirations, and improving their professional practice outperformed the students who valued these traits less. Learners who possessed moderate level of content knowledge seemed to benefit most from the course. This paper contributes insight into aspects of students' behaviors that possibly contributed to their success in a MOOC and invites discussion on how to reinforce these traits. Active groups of learners outperformed in the MOOC compared to the other groups.Learners with moderate prior content knowledge benefitted most from the course.Different motives for participation result in different course performance.