Abstract
The persistent challenge of low completion rates in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) represents a significant barrier to the development of this educational medium. This study, underpinned by the theoretical perspective of personal relevance and goal setting, posits that the deployment of personalized push notifications (PPNs), tailored to mirror students' self-paced progress, could foster increased student engagement and performance in online learning contexts. In pursuit of this hypothesis, we incorporated Line—a leading instant messenger service in East Asia—into a MOOC platform, and probed the potential effects of PPNs on learner engagement and performance. This investigation was undertaken in a MOOC course titled Cell Biology, delivered in Mandarin Chinese. This six-week course had attracted over 1000 enrollments prior to this study, with a total of 62 participants who had registered for Line services actively participating. Employing a between-subject experimental design, students were assigned to either an experimental group, which received weekly PPNs and emails, or a control group, which received only emails. Learners' weekly progress was monitored, and they were provided with personalized notifications twice a week. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that the post-test scores of the experimental group were significantly superior to those of the control group. This difference remained statistically significant after controlling for learners' pre-test scores, gender, and prior online learning experiences through an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Our findings indicate that PPN services can notably enhance test performance. Moreover, we observed a significantly greater level of social engagement in the experimental group, although there were no discernible differences in behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement between the groups. The effectiveness of PPNs combined with their relatively low cost and limited need for ongoing instructor or designer input suggest that this approach could be a scalable way to enhance learner engagement and performance in MOOCs.