Gender Factors In Massive Open Online Courses
A MOOC is designed as an open‐concept online course, intended to support unlimited number of students over the web. MOOCs began when George Siemens and Stephen Downes formed what they termed a “connectivist MOOC” or “cMOOC”, where learning happened within a network. Course conducted usually include lecture videos, reading materials, assessment and quizzes, and most importantly interactive forums to enhance collaboration between learners and professors and other teaching assistants. MOOCs allows for thousands of learners to concurrently participate in a learning experience. Moreover, MOOCs offers large scale usage by influencing learners in developing parts of the world get access to education. With such a large access and successful reachability, many studies reveals that, MOOCs suffers to retain students or learners until end of the learning module.
A non-profit start up, edX, from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had 370, 000 students in its first official courses in 2012. Another start-up, Coursera, has reached 1. 7 million members registered. Introduction to Computer Science course offered by Harvard University had 150, 349 students enrolled, while only 1388 students received diplomas, and that is only 0. 923% of the entire enrolment. Adding on, MITx offered Circuit and Electronics somewhere in March 2012 and edX in September 2012, and they both had 154, 736 and 46, 000 respectively. The actual number of students who completed the course was 7157 for MITX which is 4. 6 % of total number of enrolments, and 3008 for edX which is 6. 5% of total enrolment.
Like previous technological advancements in broadcast media, such as radio and television, MOOCs were anticipated to make more contribution to world of education. Theoretically, online courses that often provided by professors from top universities are available almost for everyone whom with internet access regardless of gender differences. The social cognitive theory (SCT) claims that an one’s behavioural intention reflects inner psychological motivations and external environmental which social and institutional factors. Male and female behave differently towards an opportunity because society imposes differences through socialization processes.
Recent studies show that, only 1 in 5 learners in a STEM MOOC is female. Outcome of previous research shows that, the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) MOOC completion rate by gender alone, only 3. 06% of females and 3. 11% of males who enrolled in STEM MOOCs completed at least one STEM MOOC. Prominent individual psychological motivations, such as self-efficacy, self-enjoyment and self-development are shapes individuals’ belief about worth and ease of use of MOOCs; As for the external social and institutional factors, social norm and management of commitments that determine individuals’ belief about usefulness of MOOCs.
These behavioural differences are derived not from biological differences but socially constructed process as they are framed and enforced by the accepted norms and value systems in the society. Thus, males and females display different social behaviours in different situations. Males are known to be more “pragmatic”, then females and usually have a greater importance on earnings, thus are more likely to be motivated by achievement needs. And here is the completely contrast outcome, in which females in single-gender groups in MOOC group activities achieved better than males and had a better attitude towards the course. Females students indeed beaten male students of similar group in mixed-gender groups activities in learning outcomes. Gender acknowledged as a noteworthy factor on the relationship between social influence and behavioural intent when engaging with MOOC platforms.
