The importance of motivation and communication in MOOCs as elements to increase completion rates A study at MOOCs on Climate Change Enzo Ferrari-Lagos Department of Mathematics and Science Education, University of Salamanca enzoferrari@usal.es Fernando Martínez-Abad GRIAL Research Group, Research Institute for Educational Sciences, University of Salamanca fma@usal.es Camilo Ruiz Department of Mathematics and Science Education, University of Salamanca camilo@usal.es ABSTRACT Climate change is the greatest environmental, social and economic threat of our time and afects all forms of life on earth. Although important advances have been made such as the Paris agreement, social action is needed to mobilize the population. Education needs to become a fundamental tool for climate change mitigation, adap- tation and resilience. Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are a good tool to boost Climate literacy through education to address this issue due to their characteristics. We have used this tool to investigate the Climate Competence in primary and secondary teachers and developed a research program around this issue. In this paper, we look into one particular problem of the MOOCs: The high dropout rate. We discuss what are some of the reasons for this high dropout rate in the literature and describe how the MOOC can be designed to overcome this issue. We also look, into the diferent characteristics that online formation can have to afect this rate. We also discuss what is the dropout rate in our courses and how our design choices have improved the expected fnalization rates. CCS CONCEPTS · Applied Computing; · Education; · Collaborative learning; · Social and professional topics; · Professional topics; · Com- puting education;· Informal education; KEYWORDS Education, Climate Change Education, completion rate, massive online open courses (MOOCs) ACM Reference Format: Enzo Ferrari-Lagos, Fernando Martínez-Abad, and Camilo Ruiz. 2020. The importance of motivation and communication in MOOCs as elements to increase completion rates: A study at MOOCs on Climate Change. In Eighth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multi- culturality (TEEM’20), October 21ś23, 2020, Salamanca, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3434780.3436633 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. TEEM’20, October 21ś23, 2020, Salamanca, Spain © 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8850-4/20/10. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3434780.3436633 1 CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION THAT DRIVES THE DISSERTATION RESEARCH 1.1 Education for climate change Climate Change is the main threat to our planet and all the species that live in it. In order to contain the impact of this change, it is necessary to carry out a rapid decarbonization of the economy by 2050 [17]. Education has been identifed as an important tool for achieving adaptation and mitigation in many international treaties, for example the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in its text of the Paris Agreement of 2015, article 12, urges all countries to promote education on climate change, as well as to increase and encourage public access to information on this subject. Although education is increasingly being recognized as a tool to fght climate change, a general framework or strategy to implement it has not yet been defned. To provide this framework, our research group has proposed [13] the introduction of a Climate Change Competence (C3). This new concept would help to organize many of the attributes needed by society to produce a coherent response around a well-established concept in Education such as competence, which could easily be introduced into national legislations and school systems. Also, the training of teachers at all educational levels, both in terms of scientifc knowledge of the problem and in an adequate pedagogical practice, is an approach that should be taken into account as an aid to climate change mitigation [17]. 1.2 MOOCs as tools of mitigation and adaptation against climate change. In recent years, millions of people around the world have been at- tracted to new online teaching models called Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Governments, commercial organizations and institutions have shown great interest in the evolving phenomena of e-learning, because they are an alternative to expand knowl- edge and also support social needs and help individuals to learn throughout their lives [20]. In our research group we have developed a methodology to study the role of the Education to mobilize society for solutions to the Climate crisis. The methodology consists in the design and production of MOOCs about the Science of Climate Change for teachers of primary and secondary education and the general public. Then we ofer these courses and study how the Climate Competence develops as a result of the courses. The Climate Change Competence