HarvardX and MITx: The first year of open online courses

Posted on January 18th, 2014

Researchers from HarvardX and MITx have released a report that summarizes findings from their first full academic year of offering courses on edX. From the fall of 2012 to the summer of 2013, 17 HarvardX and MITx courses were offered and, across the courses, 43,196 registrants earned certificates of completion, while another 35,937 registrants explored half or more of course content without certification, and 292,852 registrants never engaged with the online content. The findings showed that registrants who were active after the first week had a relatively high chance of visiting again in subsequent weeks. The report states that new metrics beyond grades are necessary to capture the diverse usage patterns in the data. Additional working papers and course reports from specific MOOCs may be downloaded from Harvard here and MIT here.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2381263