Now it is time to talk about the netnographic part of our study. In order to conduct this part of our study, we have chosen to monitor the comments and reviews across different MOOC platforms in order to find what customers seek when they go through an online course. In order to have consistency in our measurement, we have decided to focus our study on courses that teach introductory level programming in the Python programming language. We have chosen these courses because they are prevalent across all platforms and because they are aimed toward beginner programmers. For the study we have collected comments from four platforms: Udemy, Coursera, Skillshare, and Udacity. As a result, we have gathered 126 reviews and comments from these courses and then sorted and analyzed them.
The gathered reviews from customers can be split into three categories: feedback toward the instructor, feedback regarding the testing of the covered material, and difficulty of the material.
The first category of reviews deals with assessment of the instructor, the way they structure the course and interaction with the students. From the comments it became clear that it is one of the most important criteria for the students, and they may not take up the course if they cannot follow the instructor.
Examples of comments
The second factor relates to the assessment of the covered material and practical applications of the learned subject. In many of the comments, students mention the importance of assessment and react positively to practical projects. All the courses with good reviews mention that they extract more value from the course. When there are no projects, this leads the students to write more negative reviews.
However, sometimes the course projects were also deemed too hard to complete by the students. In this case, this made them struggle, and not being able to complete the course.
Third factor: students also react negatively when the material does not match the description for the course. This is particularly obvious for courses that are too advanced for the students and really need prerequisites before starting this course.
Conclusion
Overall, the results of netnography show that the most important variable that students consider when continuing the course is the instructor and the way the instructor structures the course and engages with the students. In addition, practical assignments are very important for students in order to test themselves and feel that they have properly digested the material. At the same time, in some cases the students may struggle with the material and the projects if they don’t have pre-requisites or are not expecting too advanced topics to be covered. In this case, they are not inclined to continue as they have a hard barrier to overcome to understand the material.