The Involvement of Academic and Emotional Support for Sustainable Use of MOOCs

Abstract

MOOCs, the Massive Open Online Courses, are online educational courses that offer open access to a large number of participants globally. However, online engagement during MOOC learning remains a problem, as reflected in relatively high dropout rates. This paper involves academic and emotional support, aiming to explore whether they contribute to users’ sustainable use of the MOOC platform. A total of 410 college students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) and with MOOC learning experience participated in this study. Employing the structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques, we examined the relationships among five factors in the EFL MOOC learning context: academic support (AS), emotional support (ES), perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEoU), and platform reputation (PR). The results indicate that academic support influences learners’ perceptions of the usefulness and ease of use of the MOOC platform, as well as enhancing learners’ feelings of being emotionally supported. Simultaneously, platform reputation plays a crucial role in influencing learners’ perceptions of MOOC platforms. However, results suggest that emotional support does not have a statistically significant impact on the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the platform in EFL MOOC learning contexts.

Keywords

• MOOCs
• engagement
• dropout rate
• academic support
• emotional support
• platform reputation