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Research on the factors influencing the learner satisfaction of MOOCs

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Abstract

Learner satisfaction is the degree of consistency between learners’ perception and expectation of learning experience. In massive online open courses, analyzing the influencing factors of learner satisfaction is of great significance to improving the quality of course development and learning experience. Taking the open course reviews as data source, the paper adopted topic sentiment analysis and intermediary hierarchical linear modelling to analyze the impact of different student and course level features on learner satisfaction. The data analysis shows that the schedule, workload and completion status, as well as the video, instructor, content and evaluation topics play significant roles in explaining learner satisfaction; However, perceived difficulty, structure and interaction are not related to learner satisfaction; Meanwhile, sentiment-mediated analysis found that, teachers and evaluation topics have significant mediating effect on schedule; Video topic has a significant mediating effect on workload. Based on the above analysis, enlightenment to curriculum designers and developers are also provided.

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Notes

  1. â and \(\widehat{b}\) represent the estimates of a and b, respectively. a and b are symbolic representation of effect quantity from independent variable to dependent variable and from independent variable to intermediate variable. This assumption does not hold in most cases.

  2. Numbers represent the level of variables, and the order of variables is independent variable, intermediate variable and dependent variable.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the project of science and Technology Department of Henan Province (192102310288) and Key scientific research projects of colleges and universities in Henan Province (22A880001)

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Correspondence to Bingxin Du.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are freely crawled from ClassCentral Platform (www.ClassCentral.com), they are also available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Ethical approval

The data for our study was collected from publicly available reviews site for free online courses. There was no animal involved in this study.

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Publicly available data is collected and used in accordance with the reviews site’s Privacy Policy (https://www.classcentral.com/about/privacy-policy).

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The authors declare that they have no confict of interest.

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Du, B. Research on the factors influencing the learner satisfaction of MOOCs. Educ Inf Technol 28, 1935–1955 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11269-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11269-0

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