MOOCs are a current trend in Higher Education; universities around the world offer open courses for lifelong and geographically distributed learners. Nevertheless, there is a high drop-out rate on these courses. The temporal aspects related to learner Temporal Perspectives (TP), self-regulation of learning, and temporal patterns could be related to drop-out rates and motivations for following a MOOC. This study aims to analyse student objective and subjective times in order to better understand their relationships with MOOC participation. The paper describes the case study methodology proposed to explore this relation: a pilot MOOC course on entrepreneurship (IE MOOC) with a total of 30 Catalan students who were active during the two-week course. The study examines the motivation and active participation of students in these learning methodologies, and practical issues on the schedule and temporal pace of MOOCs. Results show how student actions decrease as the MOOC progresses. Students connect more during weekdays and early and late evenings. They are mostly future-oriented, which is classically related to higher performance and self-regulation. This exploratory study shows how research on learners’ temporal patterns could help to advance in the understanding of MOOC students’ profile, in order to increase the currently low completion ratios.

Keywords

lifelong learning. · MOOC · temporal patterns · time perspective · time-on-task