Learners' Motivations as Incentives for Participating Political Science MOOC

Although meant to be ‘open’, hence equally accessible for everyone, it goes without saying that MOOCs’ challenge democracy within learning processes. Learners are dissimilar on various levels, which might affect their learning outcomes. In this paper, we focus on one particular parameter: learners’ motivation. Considered as the most important factor to consider in research on education, we want to explore what motivates learners to enroll in a MOOC. Although previous research on achievement motivation supports the existence of two types of motivations, MOOCs are not entirely comparable to traditional education as they are freely open to everyone. A wider variety of motivations might then stimulate learners to enroll in a course. Four main reasons of enrollment are typically highlighted in the literature by now, namely: the desire to learn about a new topic or to extend current knowledge, curiosity about MOOCs, for a personal challenge, and the desire to collect as many completion certificates as possible (Khe Foon Hew and Chung, 2014). The first aim in this study is to explore what groups of MOOC learners can be identified based on motivation. A typology of learners may help in better understanding the learning processes and their democratic challenges. Given that research on MOOCs has mainly focused on the macro level leading to a high heterogeneity in the courses analyzed, we want to control for this bias by focusing solely on one particular MOOC namely “Louv3X: Découvrir la science politique’ (Discovering political science), which has now be ran for six editions. Furthermore, it is worth noting that professors are increasingly using MOOCs in their classes in a type of blended learning. Therefore, we choose to focus on a MOOC that was also used on university campus in order to see whether the students’ population can be compared to online learners or whether their motivation is clearly dissimilar. Next, we seek to investigate whether belonging to a certain motivation group has an influence on the learners’ performance. Finally, we hypothesize that the learners’ motivation influences their appreciation of the course design.