A STUDY OF FACTORS EFFECTING LEARNER SATISFACTION IN MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES (MOOCS) IN THE INDIAN CONTEXT

By opening up the education systems to enact new models of technology to the already existing education infrastructure, a new learning experience – which is both creative and interactive – for the students will absolutely help it in the long run. The usage of MOOC's both for school usage as well as for the personal use of the students will benefit the population and the nation as a whole. They have the edge in the learning field because of their features, and them being an open source for any person interested. However, not all MOOC's seem effective, throwing a light on the learner satisfaction and the factors corresponding to it. The study focussed on identifying the factors which have an effect on the learner satisfaction in online courses (MOOC), and thus based the objective on it. This research had also kept its focus only on India and Indian respondents, and had identified factors more to this suitable geography. The learner satisfaction from MOOCs was researched on eight factors – level of interaction, networking opportunities, course pedagogy, course content, course site/portal, presence of technology, assessment features, and feedback sharing mechanisms. The relationship of the different parameters or factors with the learner satisfaction was found out through an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), done using principal axis factoring & varimax rotation, and eigen values were used to find out the relevancy of the extracted components. Based on the analysis, four components were extracted explaining a variance of 64.580% and were renamed based on the items which were loading into them. These components were renamed as “pedagogical content”, “technological assessment”, “networking & feedback”, “course site/portal”. These were the factors which affected learner satisfaction in MOOCs.