Investigating the Drivers of Student Interaction and Engagement in Online Courses: A Study of State-of-the-art

Online learning has become a widespread method for providing learning at different levels of education. It has facilitated the learning in many ways and made it more flexible and available by providing learners with more opportunities to learn information, further access to different learning resources, and collaboration rather than face-to-face learning. In spite of these benefits and rapid growth of online education, success and persistence in such courses is one the important aspects of online learning research and it relies on different factors. Therefore investigating the reasons of students' dropout of an online education course or program and its contributing factors is essential in this area. One of the most barriers in online learning system is lack of interactions. In learning, interaction between students themselves, with the course content, and course instructors is important for conveying information, enhancing teaching quality, give directions, and many more functions. The aim of this research is to review the literature to propose a clearer picture of studies have been conducted regarding online interaction and factors that impact it in online education systems.