The purpose of the present study is to examine the personal and contextual factors that may affect students' online groupwork interest. Using the data obtained from graduate students in an online course, both student- and group-level predictors for online groupwork interest were analyzed within the framework of hierarchical linear modeling analysis. The findings show that most of the variance in the outcome variable of online groupwork interest was at the student level, with online groupwork interest being positively associated with learning-oriented reasons, but negatively associated with student attitude toward online individual work. At the group level, peer-oriented reasons, learning-oriented reasons, and monitoring motivation were shown to be significant predictors for online groupwork interest. The implications of the empirical findings and future research directions were discussed.
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