Mentoring learners in MOOCs: A new way to improve completion rates?

Abstract

Since the launch of the MIT Open-Course Ware in 2001, MOOCs have developed exponentially. From a dozen in 2011, they have become ubiquitous in higher education nowadays. Far from bringing about a revolution in teaching practices, MOOCs are a new way of sharing knowledge. The so-called experimental phase facilitated exchanges between providers and users, and it now seems important to look at the first results of these courses in order to improve their effectiveness. Although MOOCs are mainly promoted by higher education establishments, they generally have very low completion rates (below 7%). After 3-years of experience with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) with good completion rates (28 to 33%) IFP School decided to improve these results by putting in place mentoring to motivate learners to not quitting before final achievement. This paper presents our MOOCs participation results and the approach we developed to enhance the coaching efficiency together with developing new pedagogical approaches.