Learners' success in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the factors influencing it have previously been examined mainly upon completion of the course. This approach does not reveal whether learners are fulfilling their initial intentions regarding MOOCs and which factors affect it and thus the individual success of the learners. This…

There are thousands of participants in different programming MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) which means thousands of solutions have to be assessed. As it is very time-consuming to assess that amount of solutions manually, using automated assessment is essential. Since task requirements must be strict for the solutions to be automatically…

In every course, there are learners who successfully pass assessments and complete the course. However, there are also those who fail the course for various reasons. One of such reasons may be related to success in assessment. Although performance in assessments has been studied before, there is a lack of knowledge on the degree of variance…

One of the problems regarding MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) is the high dropout rate. Although dropout periods have been studied, there is still a lack of understanding of how dropout differs for MOOCs with different levels of difficulty. A quantitative study was conducted to determine the periods with the highest dropouts in computer…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) can potentially affect the lives of millions of people, but there is little research on how a programming MOOC could affect participants' lives after participation. In Estonia, we have organised several programming MOOCs over the years, attended by over 14,000 people. This inspired us to develop and validate a…

Computer programming MOOCs attract people who have different motivations. Previous studies have hypothesized that the motivation declared before starting the course can be an important predictor of distinctive dropout rates. The aim of this study was to outline the main motivation clusters of participants in a computer programming MOOC, and to…

Learners who enrol in massive open online courses (MOOCs) have different backgrounds and tend to have different motivations than learners in traditional courses. Based on value-expectancy theory, an instrument was developed to measure motivation for enrolling in a programming MOOC. A study with 1229 adult participants in Estonian-language…

MOOCs for learning the basics of programming have become popular among people with a diverse range of backgrounds, interests and learning contexts. Studies show that learners who enrol in MOOCs tend to have different motivation from learners in traditional courses, but it is not known how motivation differs for people with different backgrounds.…

Learning programming has become more and more popular and organizing introductory massive open online courses (MOOCs) on programming can be one way to bring this education to the masses. While programming MOOCs usually use automated assessment to give feedback on the submitted code, the lack of understanding of certain aspects of the tasks and…

There are millions of MOOC participants who vary in gender, age, educational level, employment status, intentions, etc. Although MOOC participants' characteristics have been studied, there is still a lack of knowledge of the divergence between the participants and completers of MOOCs with different levels of difficulty. The term 'level of…