Exploring the impact of the default option on student engagement and performance in a statistics MOOC

Engagement and motivation are particularly important in optional learning environments, like educational games and massive open online courses. Providing some aspects of autonomy and choice to the student can yield significant benefits to learner motivation and persistence; yet there is also evidence that unsupported learners may not always automatically choose to allocate their learning time to pedagogical activities that are most known to be as associated with better learning outcomes. We investigated the impact of choice on student engagement and learning in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on introductory statistics and probability. We compared conditions in which students are given free choice over the practice problems completed to conditions in which students receive a full set of practice activities or no practice activities before completing a post-test. In all cases students were free to navigate to other sections of the course at any time. In one of the two topic sections that included personalized practice activities we found that students performed better in the condition in which they were prompted to complete all practice activities. Though more students in this condition dropped out before reaching the post-test, many more students completed the full set of practice activities in this section than those who did in the free choice condition. These results are still quite preliminary but suggest that providing a default encouraged opt in procedure can encourage students to do more problems than they would otherwise, and that doing such additional problems can yield learning gains.