Correlation Between Ratings of MOOCs and Students’ Characteristics

Today many universities around the world offer various Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). Reviews and MOOCs ratings help new learners to figure out what kind of courses are relevant to them. Usually, these ratings are based not only on students’ satisfaction levels regarding course content but on a set of highly influential complementary learners’ characteristics, mainly students’ qualification, background knowledge, skills, online learning experience. Therefore, it is suggested to use ratings to compare MOOCs with each other by different groups of students with various levels of experience, or to conduct a pretest to allow a student to choose personalized learning track based on their level of proficiency. In our study, based on two MOOCs of the RUDN University and two MOOCs of Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, we determine the contribution of students’ individual characteristics to the level of satisfaction with online courses and assess how it justifies the use of the rating for comparing courses. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.