"Why did you enroll in this course?": developing a standardized survey question for reasons to enroll

Abstract

Understanding motivations for enrolling in MOOCs is key for personalizing and scaling the online learning experience. We develop a standardized survey item for measuring learners' reasons to enroll, based on a corpus of open-ended responses from previous course surveys. Online coders were employed in the iterative development of response options. The item was designed to minimize response biases by adhering to best practices from survey design research.