Incentive Design on MOOC: A Field Experiment

In this study, we examine the impact of monetary incentives on learner engagement and learning outcomes in massive open online courses (MOOCs). While MOOCs have innovated education by offering high-quality interactive educational resources to users worldwide, maintaining student learning enthusiasm in these courses is a challenge. To address this issue, we conduct a field experiment in which users are given monetary incentives to engage in online learning. Our results show that those given a monetary incentive are more likely to submit homework and to gain higher grades. The effect largely reflects the continued involvement of regular users whose activity would otherwise decrease over time. We further find that the effect persists even after we remove the monetary incentives and that it spills over into learning behavior in other courses in the same and subsequent semester. Lastly, we find that females and users from regions with fewer educational institutions show stronger treatment effects. Overall, our findings suggest that monetary incentives counteract the decay of learning engagement and may help online education users form persistent learning habits.