Learners’ satisfaction of courses on Coursera as a massive open online course platform: A case study

Abstract

Online education has become more prevalent in the 21st century, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the major trends is the learning via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which is increasingly present at many universities around the world these days. In these courses, learners interact with the pre-designed materials and study everything mostly by themselves. Therefore, gaining insights into their satisfaction of such courses is vitally important to improve their learning experiences and performances. However, previous studies primarily focused on factors that affected learners’ satisfaction, not on how and what the satisfaction was. Moreover, past research mainly employed the narrative reviews posted on MOOC platforms; very few utilized survey and interview data obtained directly from MOOC users. The present study aims to fill in such gaps by employing a mixed-methods approach including a survey design and semi-structured interviews with the participation of 120 students, who were taking academic writing courses on Coursera (one of the world-leading MOOC platforms), at a private university in Vietnam. Results from both quantitative and qualitative data showed that the overall satisfaction of courses on Coursera was relatively low. Furthermore, most learners were not satisfied with their learning experience on the platform, primarily due to inappropriate assessment, lack of support, and interaction with teachers as well as improper plagiarism check. In addition, there were moderate correlations between students’ satisfaction and their perceived usefulness of Coursera courses. Pedagogically, teachers’ feedback and grading, faster support from course designers as well as easier-to-use plagiarism checking tools are needed to secure learners’ satisfaction of MOOCs.