System-, teacher- and student-level interventions for improving participation in online learning at scale in high schools

The COVID-19 pandemic saw many school systems turn to online education. In contrast to the voluntary learners in massive open online courses, school student engagement in online learning is also determined by the role of their teachers and schools. Using large-scale experiments with over 45,000 Ecuadorian high school students, this research studied interventions at the student, teacher, and system level. The results show the difficulty in incentivising online learning at scale, and a key role for central monitoring.