Students’ patterns of engagement and course performance in a Massive Open Online Course Trang Phan * , Sara G. McNeil, Bernard R. Robin University of Houston, USA article info Article history: Received 29 July 2015 Received in revised form 5 November 2015 Accepted 30 November 2015 Available online 13 December 2015 Keywords: Massive Open Online Courses Student's engagement Prior knowledge Course performance Professional development abstract A series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the Curriculum and Instruction (CUIN) Department at a university are collaboratively being designed and developed by a team of doctoral students with mentorship from two CUIN professors. The first two MOOCs, Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Digital Storytelling MOOC (DS MOOC) and Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Web 2.0 Tools, have been developed and offered multiple times on the Coursera platform. This paper reports on the relationships between learners' patterns and motives of engagement and their prior subject knowledge with their course performance in the Digital Storytelling MOOC. Results from this study indicate that learners who demonstrated active engagement in the MOOC tended to outperform other learners who did not practice this trait. Learners whose motives for participation involved earning the Continuing Professional Development certificate, gaining skills, ideas and inspirations, and improving their professional practice out- performed the students who valued these traits less. Learners who possessed moderate level of content knowledge seemed to benefit most from the course. This paper contributes insight into aspects of students’ behaviors that possibly contributed to their success in a MOOC and invites discussion on how to reinforce these traits. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Massive Open Online Courses are a unique form of online education due to an absence of admission criteria, a highly diverse student population and a variety of motives for taking the course. The term “Massive Open Online Course” (MOOC) was first used to describe a twelve-week online course, Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, designed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, offered at the University of Manitoba, Canada, in fall semester 2008 (Cormier & Siemens, 2010). “Massive” regards the capacity for courses to enroll large numbers of students, as well as to track vast quantities of participant activity and performance data. “Open” refers to low to free cost to participate as learners see fit, and materials for the course that are accessible to all users with an adequate Internet connection. As online courses, MOOCs are available via the Internet on a variety of devices and thus expand access beyond the traditional campus. Labeled a “course,” a MOOC is framed in a time period with a beginning and an end point; provides a coherent set of resources; and follows a sequence of activities organized by an instructor in order to address specific learning objectives. Current research on MOOCs highlights issues such as the influence of MOOCs on the future of higher education (Billington & Fronmuller, 2013), the effects of MOOCs on teaching * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: tphanvn@gmail.com (T. Phan), smcneil@central.uh.edu (S.G. McNeil), BRobin@central.uh.edu (B.R. Robin). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers & Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.11.015 0360-1315/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Computers & Education 95 (2016) 36e44