HarvardX and MITx: Four years of open online courses

Posted on February 2nd, 2017

A joint research team from Harvard University and MIT has published a report looking at the evolution of the MOOC movement. Since the launch of HarvardX and MITx in 2012, over 200,000 certificates have been issued, and 2.4 million unique users have participated in one or more of the online courses. This report, which follows up on findings released by the team in 2014 and 2015, addresses questions such as the demographics of learners, time it takes to earn a certificate, and growth of MOOC participation. Among the findings, the report states that MOOC participants are heterogeneous in background, and the typical certificate earner spends 29 hours interacting with an online course. The team also found that overall participation in the courses has steadily grown over the last four years, but the number of people getting certificates has decreased since free certificates were largely discontinued in 2016.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2889436