Interactions in an xMOOC: perspectives of learners who completed the course

The low retention rate becomes a scale-efficiency tradeoff for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). To resolve this tradeoff, understanding learner experience of successfully completing MOOCs is necessary. Keen completers , who complete a MOOC and meet the requirement of passing the course, tend to actively participate in course interactions; however, their voices about how interactions contribute to course completion are unheard. Therefore, this study applied a qualitative methodology to explore keen completers’ interaction experience and their perceptions of various types of interaction (e.g. learner-content, learner-learner, learner-instructor, learner-interface, learner-self, and learner-exterior interaction) in a MOOC. The findings of this study have added keen completers’ voices to existing evidence about interactions with a focus on how each type of interaction aided in the completion of a MOOC. Practical implications about maintaining learners’ effective interaction experience in MOOCs are discussed.