How Hands-On Assessments Can Boost Retention, Satisfaction, Skill Development, and Career Outcomes in Online Courses

Hands-on assessments provide active opportunities for students to practice new skills they have just learned. Massive open online course (MOOC) platforms offer a uniquely large dataset to track the impact of hands-on assessments on learners’ skill development, satisfaction, and career trajectory. While existing MOOC literature explore enrollment and demographic data, few have investigated the outcomes for learners who engage with different types of assessments within these online courses. This article is important because it quantifies the learner impact of hands-on experiences in MOOCs. With innovative analytics and hundreds of millions of course enrollments, online course platforms can shed light on the influence of alternative teaching decisions and assessment types. MOOCs offer data to quantify individual learners’ skill development in different topics before averaging across all course completers. Metrics, such as satisfaction, utilize learners’ self-reported star ratings of course material. Finally, for career outcomes, MOOC platforms can interact with learners after completing an online course to ask them how the content impacted their job-related outcomes, such as confidence in their role, receiving a promotion, or starting a new position. Control variables such as course domain, instructor characteristics, and learner demographics provide researchers with a robust dataset and thorough methodology to systematically track the benefits of hands-on opportunities in online content. This article examines the content structure and learning behavior data on a MOOC platform. The goal of this empirical study was to examine the impact of hands-on assessments on learner outcomes, including retention, satisfaction, skill development, and career outcomes.