The Future of Education

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become an important component of contemporary education. Advantages such as offering flexible learning opportunities, while supporting lifelong learning and continuous skill development, have propelled them among one of the learning tools chosen by the interested parties when considering adding competences or boosting the existing ones when confronted with a dynamic job market. Despite their potential to widen access to education, MOOCs continue to face a major challenge related to low completion rates and high dropout levels. Thus, the effectiveness of online education initiatives can be improved by understanding how academic research has addressed this issue. In this context, the present study provides a bibliometric overview of research on MOOC dropout. The aim of the paper is to identify the publication trends, dominant research directions, and the evolution of themes in this research area. The analysis is based on a dataset composed of articles indexed in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection. Through a bibliometric approach, the study examines a series of specific indicators such as the annual scientific production, influential journals and authors, collaboration patterns, and the research themes extracted in this area. The results reveal an increasing interest in MOOC dropout research, especially after 2016, with a notable acceleration in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the thematic analysis, research themes connected to learner engagement, motivation, course design, time constraints, and support mechanisms, are extracted, confirming the multifactorial nature of dropout in online education, while the analysis of the highly cited studies emphasize an accent on predictive models and data-driven approaches aimed at identifying at-risk learners and improving retention strategies. By mapping the intellectual structure and evolution of MOOC dropout research, this paper contributes to a clearer understanding of existing knowledge gaps and emerging research priorities.

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania - Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, within the project entitled „JobKG—A Knowledge Graph of the Romanian Job Market based on Natural Language Processing”, contract no. 760274/26.03.2024, code CF 178/31.07.2023