exaggerated or absent. The need to pass the course, for instance, is drastically reduced, because progress on to subsequent courses is not dependent on it, and most importantly, because there is no financial commitment and the personal interest in learning is heightened. In conventional courses there will be a wide range of different types of learner, but in MOOCs, the presence of what are termed ‘leisure learners’ is much higher than normal. They’re nearly all leisure learners – they don’t have to do this after all, it’s something that is competing with leisure pursuits. A whole new class of learners exist in MOOCs that you rarely see in formal education. These are what we might term drive-by learners (after Groom’s 2011 ‘drive-by assignments’). These are learners who are signing up because they can. It costs nothing to sign up; they can take a look, see if they like anything and move on. They may dip in and out over the course, taking bits they find engaging, or they may not even turn up at all. In formal education the financial and emotional commitment is much higher, making drive-by learners very rare. Kizilcec, Piech and Schneider (2013) used analytics to differentiate four types of MOOC learners: completing, auditing, disengaging and sampling. Although a comparison of these four types with formal learners has not been completed, one could assume that the commitments required to continue in formal education reduces the likelihood of sampling and auditing students, with the emphasis on completing.
If we consider these new types of learners and their intentions, then the existing quality measures don’t map across satisfactorily. For instance, very few of these learners have course completion as a major goal. And progression on to other courses is not yet a metric in a pick-and-choose world, although we will undoubtedly see increasing pressures to make MOOC learners persist with a particular brand of MOOC provider, just as we see this with
