MOOCs have been one of the most prominent innovations in education over the past decade, but despite their growing popularity, they continue to struggle with low completion rates. New research from Cornell suggests it’s a problem with no single solution, and instead requires a menu of interventions tailored for the individual circumstances of students.

The researchers analyzed around 250,000 students across 250 MOOCs over a 2.5 year timeframe.  Their inspiration was the previous research into boosting completion rates, which found that short, light-touch interventions at the start of courses can improve completion rates, but this has not proved easy to scale up.

“My advice to instructors is to understand and address the specific challenges in their learning environment,” the researcher says. “If students have issues with their internet connection, you can’t help them overcome them with a self-regulation intervention. But if students need to go to bed on time in order to be awake for a morning lecture, or they need to plan ahead for when to start working on homework in order to have it ready to hand in, then a brief self-regulation intervention can in fact help students overcome these obstacles.”

Improving completion rates

The courses, which were hosted on the edX and Open edX platforms and were run by Stanford, MIT, and Harvard respectively, suffered many of the same problems that blight MOOCs generally, so the research tested a number of interventions to try and change matters.

It had previously been found that goal-setting interventions had proven effective, but this was only after small-scale experimentation.  The new study tested four specific interventions:

• plan-making, where students are prompted to develop detailed plans for when, where, and how they complete coursework;
• a related activity in which students reflect on the benefits and barriers of achieving their goal, and plan ahead about how to respond to challenges;
• social accountability, where they pick someone to hold them accountable for their progress in the course, and plan when and what to tell them; and
• value-relevance, where they write about how completing the course reflects and reinforces their most important values.

The first three of these interventions involve the student planning ahead, which was found to be effective at boosting engagement in the early weeks of the course, before dwindling later on.  The last intervention was found to be most effective in developing countries, where student outcomes have traditionally been worst of all.  Interestingly, however, this improvement only appeared in courses where there was a global achievement gap, as where no such gap existed, the intervention actually hurt student performance in developing countries.

Successful interventions

The researchers then attempted to understand if they could predict whether an achievement gap might appear in a particular course, and therefore better understand where particular interventions might be effective.  Unfortunately, this proved easier said than done, which they accept is a major hurdle to overcome.

Even an AI-based tool designed to help them predict the most effective interventions for particular students was not really any more effective than simply assigning the same intervention to all.

“It calls into question the potential of AI to provide personalized interventions to struggling students,” the researchers say. “Approaches that focus on understanding what works best in individual environments and then tailoring interventions to those environments might be more effective.”

It’s a study that presents as many questions as it provides answers, but in the effort to further improve the success of MOOCs, it’s a worthy addition to the literature.