Does Social Interaction Improve Service Quality? Field Evidence from Massive Open Online Education

This paper studies how service providers can construct social interaction among participants and quantify the causal impact of that interaction on service quality. We focus on education and analyze whether encouraging social interaction among students improves learning outcomes in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which are a new service delivery channel with universal access at reduced, if not zero, cost. We analyze two randomized experiments in a MOOC with 24,225 students from 183 countries. The first experiment studies large-group interaction by encouraging a random subset of students to visit the course discussion board. The majority of students treated by this experiment had higher social engagement, higher quiz completion rates, and higher course grades. Using this treatment as an instrumental variable, we estimate that one additional board visit causally increases the probability that a student finishes the quiz in the subsequent week by up to 3.5%. The second experiment studies small-group interaction by encouraging a random subset of students to conduct one-on-one discussions. Students who followed through and actually conducted pairwise discussions did increase their quiz completion rates and quiz scores by 10% in the subsequent week. Combining results from these two experiments, we provide recommendations for designing social interaction mechanisms to improve service quality.