Structured Study Time, Self-Efficacy, and Tutoring

Massive on line courses have the potential to make quality higher education accessible to a much larger public, but they have been plagued by low retention rates. Using the online course “The Challenges of Global Poverty,” we propose to implement a series of interventions designed to test scalable methods to improve student retention and performance in online courses, with the goal of improving meaningful access to this resource. Compared to regular classes, MOOCs lack (1) structure and (2) support and (3) ways to boost students’ confidence. We test whether committing to a regular study time encourages enhances student performance, and whether various enforcement mechanisms can further strengthen this effect. We test whether self-efficacy messaging can boost marginalized students’ self-expectations of performance and in turn their eventual performance. Finally, we implement a tutoring program to test whether supplementing online instruction with personalized, virtual tutoring results in cost-effective learning gains.