Redefining "What" in Analyses of Who Does What in MOOCs

To advance our understanding of learning in massive open online courses (MOOCs), we need to understand how learners interact with course resources. Prior explorations of learner interactions with MOOC materials have often described these interactions through stereotypes, which does not account for the full spectrum of potential learner activities. A focus on stereotypes also limits our ability to explore the reasons behind learner behaviors. To overcome these shortcomings, we apply factor analysis to learner activities within four MOOCs to identify emergent behavior factors. The factors support characterizations of learner behaviors as driven heavily by types of learning activities and secondarily by time/topic; regression revealed demographic factors (especially country and gender) associated with these activity and topic preferences. Both factor and regression analyses revealed structural variability in learner activity patterns across MOOCs. The results call for a reconceptualization of how different learning activities within a MOOC are designed to work together.