E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Often I hear remarks about the completion rates of MOOCs. Personally I don't see a problem there as long as participant are satisfied with their experience and what they have learned.

In most comments people talk about completion rates below 10%. Although 10% of a populair MOOC is stil a couple of thousand learners who complete the course.

Katy Jordan, a graduate student at The Open University of the UK, has done some research on this:

While Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may allow free education on an enormous scale, one of the biggest criticisms raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

She has created a webpage where you can filter the results she has collected.

Phil Hill has blogged about this also and made some good remarks:

• The average completion rate of xMOOCs is 7.6%, with a minimum of 0.67% and a maximum of 19.2%. The 19.2% appears to be an outlier from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, although it may be worth figuring out how they got their rate so high.
• Does it bother anyone that we get this data from a graduate student from The Open University but not from any of the xMOOC providers who claim the power of data analytics in their platforms?
• In the end, the meme of 10% MOOC completion rates is not too far off, at least for Coursera courses.

I'm personally interested to see if these completion rates improve in time.