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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I've received an email from Kim Allen at MIT concerning the results of the MITx and Harvardx MOOC projects, which I'll quote at some length: "MIT and Harvard University today announced the release of a series of working papers based on 17 online courses offered on the edX platform... The working paper series features detailed reports about individual courses; these reports reveal differences and commonalities among massive open online courses (MOOCs)." Key takeaways include:

  • Course completion rates, often seen as a bellwether for MOOCs, can be misleading and may at times be counterproductive.
  • Most MOOC attrition happened after students first registered for a course. On average, 50 percent of people left within a week or two of enrolling.
  • Given the massive scale of some MOOCs, small percentages are often still large numbers of students — and signify a potentially large impact.

Key links: MITx Working Papers, HarvardX Working Papers, Working Paper #1: HarvardX and MITx: The First Year of Open Online Courses, Fall 2012-Summer 2013, Pilot Data Visualizations, Courses on edX (Note that some of these links have been quite slow to respond (but that might just be my network here in Ottawa)).

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 19, 2024 12:03 a.m.

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