Building engagement for MOOC students: introducing support for time management on online learning platforms

The main objectives of massive open online courses (MOOC) are to foster knowledge through free high quality learning materials procurement; to create new knowledge through diverse users' interactions with the providing platform; and to empower research on learning. However, MOOC providers are also businesses (either profit or not-for-profit). They are still in the early stages of their development, but sooner or later, in order to secure their existence and assure their longterm growth, they will have to adapt a business model and monetize the services they provide. Nevertheless, despite their popularity MOOCs are characterized by a very high drop-out rate (about 90%), which may turn out to be a problem regardless of the adapted business model. Hence, MOOC providers can either assume the scale benefits to be sufficiently high to ignore the problem of low MOOC completion rate or tackle this problem. In this paper we explore the problem of the high drop-out rate in massive open online courses. First, we identify its main cause by conducting an online survey, namely bad time organization. Secondly, we provide suggestions to reduce the rate. Specifically, we argue that MOOC platforms should not only provide their users with high quality educational materials and interaction facilities. But they should also support and assist the users in their quest for knowledge. Thus, MOOC platforms should provide tools helping them optimize their time usage and subsequently develop metacognitive skills indispensable in proper time management of learning processes.