Understanding factors promoting or preventing participants' completion of a massive open online course (MOOC) is an important research topic, as attrition rates remain high for this environment. Motivation and digital skills have been identified as aspects promoting student engagement in a MOOC, and they are considered necessary for success.…

As online courses become more common, practitioners are in need of clear guidance on how to translate best educational practices into web-based instruction. Moreover, student engagement is a pressing concern in online courses, which often have high levels of dropout. Our goals in this work were to experimentally study routine instructional design…