Planning Prompts Increase and Forecast Course Completion in Massive Open Online Courses
Name
planning.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
666.09 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f694812e96247c1d9695c72923e2b29f
Author(s)
Yeomans, Michael
Reich, Justin
Date Issued
March 2017
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Yeomans, Michael and Reich, Justin. 2017. "Planning Prompts Increase and Forecast Course Completion in Massive Open Online Courses."
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Among all of the learners in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) who intend to complete a course, the majority fail to do so. This intention-action gap is found in many domains of human experience, and research in similar goal pursuit domains suggests that plan-making is a cheap and effective nudge to encourage follow-through. In a natural field experiment in three HarvardX courses, some students received open-ended planning prompts at the beginning of a course. These prompts increased course completion by 29%, and payment for certificates by 40%. This effect was largest for students enrolled in traditional schools. Furthermore, the contents of students' plans could predict which students were least likely to succeed - in particular, students whose plans focused on specific times were unlikely to complete the course. Our results suggest that planning prompts can help learners adopted productive frames of mind at the outset of a learning goal that encourage and forecast student success.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3027385.3027416
