Harvard and MIT reports on MOOC

A new report from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that some of the most widely cited critiques doubting the impact and effectiveness of massive open online courses might be misleading.

The two institutions, which founded major MOOC provider edX, are releasing a series of working papers examining 17 courses hosted by the edX platform. Among their major takeaways: Course completion rates might not be the best measure of a MOOC’s impact or potential for teaching and learning. While course completion rates have historically been low, tens of thousands of students are still accessing and learning from content.

“We found students in the courses who engaged with every single piece of the courseware, students who only read text or viewed videos, students who only took assessments or completed problem sets and students representing nearly every possible combination of these behaviors,” said Isaac Chuang, co-author of the papers and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. “Experimentation is part of the learning process.”

And while 50 percent of students drop the course within the first two weeks of enrolling, the likelihood that a student will stop engaging in the course drops to 16 percent after that window of time passes.

The report also says MOOC demographic information can be misleading. The most common course taker is a male with a bachelor’s degree, age 26 or older. But that describes fewer than one in three course takers, the report says. Thirty-three percent out of a total 234,463 students said they had a high school education or less. About 6.3 percent said they were 50 years old or older and and 2.7 percent had IP or mailing addresses from underdeveloped countries.

“While typical MOOC registrants have a college degree already, hundreds of thousands of our registrants do not,” Chuang said. “Many of our MOOC registrants are from the United States, but 72 percent are from abroad. These MOOCs are reaching many nontraditional and underserved communities of students, very different from typical students on campuses at traditional universities.”
The MIT working papers: http://bit.ly/1eahMo9 and the Harvard working papers: http://bit.ly/1eQ3nPs
— Caitlin Emma

POLITICO 

Click here to report this email as spam.