Massive Open Online Courses in Programming: the Case of Estonia

Most of the related work describes the designing of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) and the motivational aspects of the participants separately, but not in a combined way using motivational aspects and several support mechanisms. Programming MOOCs provided by the University of Tartu are characterized by a high percentage of graduates (50-70%), which is unusual for MOOCs and is mainly achieved through different automated and non-automated feedback, support systems and learning activities and the fact that these MOOCs are held in Estonian language [4]. The focus of my PhD study is to investigate the participants' motivation and the associations between the motivation, the accomplishment and using of support mechanisms in the courses. We also want to study the impact of the programming MOOCs in a society of Estonia by investigating participants' career choice after conducting MOOC.