Exploring the Relationship Between MOOC Resource Management and Students' Perceived Benefits and Satisfaction via SEM

Introduction

Online learning is effective and liberating for learners. Learners can find a variety courses on the web, and browse their preferred institution for programs, classes, and instructors that meet their needs (Ko & Rossen, 2010). A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course offered to vast numbers of students via the web. MOOCs are known for inspiring open-access, self-directed learning, and are considered the greatest recent innovation in education. MOOCs are popular and easily accessible to the public. MOOCs have satisfied the needs of most users, and hence, they became a disruptive innovation in the educational field. Furthermore, thanks to the advantages of MOOCs, such as ease of access, variety of courses for selection, and suitability for continuous or lifelong learning, 95.56% of participants say they would repeat their course again (OpenLearning, 2015).

Studies have analyzed various aspects of MOOCs, such as their pedagogical and learning theories; their technological implementation worldwide (Kesim & Altinpulluk, 2015; Margaryan et al., 2015); their use of gamification to motivate students to complete their studies (Gené et al., 2014); their key successes (Aparicio et al., 2019); the attitudes of students and instructors toward MOOCs; the challenges of MOOCs (Hew & Cheung, 2014; Ulrich & Nedelcu, 2015); the metrics that can be used to measure effectiveness of MOOCs (Munoz-Merino et al., 2015); the continuing intention to use MOOCs (Dai et al., 2020; Wu & Chen, 2017) or to revisit the same course (Huang et al., 2017); and user experience (Chen et al., 2020). There is a boom in research on evaluating the effectiveness of MOOCs, ways to improve student learning, and the associated challenges. Based on the structural topic modeling analyses in many research articles on computers and education, most MOOCs gained high scores in their organization and presentation of course material, but exhibited decreasing topic trends from the statistical test (Chen et al., 2020). In Malaysia, MOOCs are still relatively new, but most universities have started to appreciate the benefits and potential of MOOC practices and use them in their blended learning model. While MOOC implementation is a strategy used to build a branded education system globally, as stated in the Malaysia Higher Education Blueprint, some scholars have questioned MOOCs’ scalability, sustainability, and educational quality, and identified the absence of a workable business model as the biggest challenge for the education providers (Wintrup et al., 2015). Therefore, a sustainability model needs to be developed for the scalability and worldwide openness of MOOCs.

User satisfaction has been studied for different online education platforms, including MOOCs (Chen et al., 2020). Moreover, satisfaction is identified as one of the most frequently used terms for the topic of technology acceptance model from the structural topic modelling analysis (Chen et al., 2020). Previous studies have also found that user satisfaction depends on perceived benefits that help individuals to develop their brand of knowledge (Keller, 1993), which further leads to brand loyalty, relevancy, expectancy, and satisfaction (Kim et al., 2020) in social science and business studies. Despite these studies, research that examines factors that affect learners’ satisfaction with e-learning is the most common type of research in this field, and has also been increasing in the field of computers in education (Chen et al., 2020). The students’ perceived benefits are considered the mediator between resource management and student satisfaction in a MOOC sustainability context. This paper attempts to empirically construct a reliable sustainability model that can be used to predict undergraduates’ level of satisfaction with MOOCs from the learners’ perspective for MOOC resource management.