Harvard & MIT Report on Their First Year of MOOCs
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Harvard & MIT have issued a detailed 33 page report on their first year experience with MOOCs, open online courses. Here are brief summaries of their conclusions.
HarvardX and MITx registrants are not “students” in a conventional sense, and they and their behavior differ from traditional students in K-12 and post-secondary institutions. Registration requires no cost or commitment, thus traditional metrics, like certification rates and enrollment rates, miss many new facets of course engagement, such as skilled learners dropping in to learn one specific aspect of a course.
Registrant activity differs considerably within and across courses.
There will be no grand unifying theory of MOOCs. Our results suggest that describing MOOCs as though they are a monolithic collection of courses misses the differential usefulness and impact MOOCs may have from sector to sector.
Given how different some of these courses and sectors are, their commonalities are surprising. Regardless of course and enrollment times, most registrants leave within a week or two of their entering the course, but remaining registrants are far less likely to leave in subsequent weeks. Certification rates are similar on average and in their variability across HarvardX and MITx, in spite of the substantial differences between HarvardX and MITx courses.
Asynchronicity is a defining feature of open online learning, with implications for how we study it.
Measuring learning requires a greater investment in assessment and research.
Open online courses are neither useless nor the salvation of higher-education. Large-scale, “low-touch” learning platforms will have sectors and niches where they are very useful and others where they are less so.
You can read the full report here, at SSRN The report thus emphasizes the diversity of uses for which MOOCs may be beneficial. I don’t think these findings indicate that MOOCs are of value for rigorous traditional courses in which students are expected to work through a systematic course to its conclusion.
Read original articleTags: Harvard, MIT, online courses
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