Education Policy, Business and Technology

Harvard/MIT Report Analyzes 4 Years of MOOC Data

Campus Technology: If you were to describe the typical Harvard or MIT MOOC participant, he (yes, not she) would come from outside of the United States, be in his 20s, hold a bachelor-level degree and register for the course with the intention of getting certified. But that hardly tells the whole story. Two of the brains behind the institutions' edX programs have released results of a joint research project that mined the data generated through four years of MOOC activity.

Isaac Chuang, senior associate dean of digital learning, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and professor of physics at MIT, and Andrew Ho, chair of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning (VPAL) Research Committee and a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, examined 2.3 billion events logged online by 4.5 million participants to produce the highly readable "HarvardX and MITx: Four Years of Open Online Courses."

Read article