Studying Unintended Consequences of Using MOOC Interface: an Affordance Perspective to Address the Dropout Problem in MOOCs

Abstract

Governments and policy makers, especially for developing countries are adopting digital means to solve societal problems such as health, education and safety through Transformational Information Technology systems. Such a transformation in the field of education has been brought by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) which aim to empower learners through an online medium of training overcoming physical and financial limitations. However, this large scale intervention is marred by a serious dropout problem. This paper address the dropout problem in MOOCs through improvement in its interface design. I assert that it is imperative to identify the cause of the mismatch between the goals of designer (in terms of his expectations) and that of the participants (in terms of their intentions) for using the MOOC. In this paper, I present affordances as the 'theory of solution' to facilitate bidirectional communication between the instructor and participants through a better design, thus leading to lower dropout rates. I conduct a longitudinal case study to analyze the design and use phases of a MOOC in a premier management institute. Through this work, I plan to contribute towards extending the understanding of the affordance concept in the field of Information Systems by developing an Affordance Perception-Actualization-Assessment process model. This work has strong policy implications in identifying and correcting the causes of high dropout rates among learners using MOOCs.