On the Impact of Personality in Massive Open Online Learning

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained considerable momentum since their inception in 2011. They are, however, plagued by two issues that threaten their future: learner engagement and learner retention. MOOCs regularly attract tens of thousands of learners, though only a very small percentage complete them successfully. In the traditional classroom setting, it has been established that personality impacts different aspects of learning. It is an open question to what extent this finding translates to MOOCs: do learners' personalities impact their learning & learning behaviour in the MOOC setting? In this paper, we explore this question and analyse the personality profiles and learning traces of hundreds of learners that have taken a EX101x Data Analysis MOOC on the edX platform. We find learners' personality traits to only weakly correlate with learning as captured through the data traces learners leave on edX.