Analyzing instructional design quality and students' reviews of 18 courses out of the Class Central Top 20 MOOCs through systematic and sentiment analyses

Abstract This study integrated a systematic analysis of instructional design and a sentiment analysis of student reviews of 18 courses from the Class Central Top 20 MOOCs to analyze the potential connections between instructional design quality and student reviews. The analysis of instructional design quality was based on the ten-principle framework. The results indicated that: 1) the instructional design quality of the highly-rated courses was in the medium-to-upper range; 2) there was a positive correlation between the instructional design quality and MOOCs ranking; 3) student sentiment was much more positive for Humanities courses compared to other subjects; 4) the student sentiment and MOOCs ranking had no significant correlation, but there was a positive correlation between student sentiment and the instructional design quality; and 5) the design of learning activities related to “Collaboration”, “Differentiation” and “Collective knowledge” needed to be improved. The implications for practice and ideas for future research are outlined.