Online education provides learning opportunities to a global audience. Most popular MOOC platforms have millions of users and MOOC designers are already competing with each other on how to spark and retain the interest of students. However, currently in popular MOOCs, roughly 90% of enrolled students yield their participation and previous research has identified that the dropouts occur mostly in the very early stages of the courses. This study explores student retention and engagement in pedagogical online courses aimed for university staff members and doctoral students, with quantitative data (N = 404) collected between the years 2016–2019. In addition, this study looks at differences in dropout rates between students of different age, gender, teaching position and department. Based on the conducted statistical analysis, age, gender, teaching position or department have no significant correlation with dropout rates. The majority of participants who drop out from the courses do so in the beginning without completing a single task. University teachers and doctoral students behave in online courses similarly as other students, and the results of the current study fits well with predictions from previous studies. However, this study found two anomalies: (1) A relatively low dropout rate (38,1%) and (2) Over 22% of students yielding their participation return to the courses (n = 31) after which over 50% of them complete the courses. The results highlight the importance of the beginning of online courses for reducing the overall dropout rates and suggest that students yielding their participation are likely to complete the courses the second time, if they enroll again.