Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) pose few barriers to enrollment and are typically free of charge to those that take them. Unlike enrollment in traditional, for-credit learning experiences, learners may persist or drop out of MOOCs at will with few consequences. This dissertation is an exploratory study meant to identify factors associated with student activity in a MOOC. Using survey data from a pre-course survey administered by The Pennsylvania State University, 3,021 student survey responses were matched to participant completion data recorded by Coursera (via a Clickstream data file) for four dependent variables--lessons viewed, video lectures viewed, assessments taken, and discussion forum participation. Thirty-two independent variables were identified from the precourse survey and were sorted into four categories--characteristics, experience, motivations/intentions, and expectations. In analyses that involved "discussion forum participation," a binary-coded variable, as a dependent variable, binary logistic regression was conducted to examine the relationship between the dependent variable and the 32 independent variables measured. Because all other dependent variables examined in this study were nominal in more than two categories, multinomial logit analysis was selected to model the relationship between the dependent variable and the 32 independent variables measured. Several independent variables were shown to repeatedly have relationships with the four dependent variables. The majority of these occurred in the characteristics and motivations/intentions categories. Understanding what drives people to persist in online courses can help to shape new design thinking and delivery methods across multiple platforms and disciplines. The hope is that by gathering a large set of data, and working to create a starting point of research via this dissertation, more effort can now be spent digging into the relationships that were identified to determine if perhaps changes to the way that courses are developed or delivered can help to raise the odds of individuals successfully persisting with educational endeavors. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]