“MOOC Completion Rates Below 7%”

From Times Higher Education:

The average completion rate for massive open online courses is less than 7 per cent, according to data compiled by an Open University doctoral student as part of her own Mooc studies.
Katy Jordan, whose PhD research focuses on online academic social networks, took time out from her doctorate to gather information on the number of people completing a range of free web-based courses. So far, she has tracked down information on the percentage of students completing 29 Moocs.
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According to her findings, which are based on local news articles, university documents, presentations and other information sources (including Times Higher Education), the average Mooc completion rate across the 29 courses was just 6.8 per cent.
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The course with the highest rate of completion was Functional Programming Principles in Scala, from Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and offered on the US Mooc platform Coursera. According to Ms Jordan’s research, some 19.2 per cent of the 50,000 students who enrolled completed the course.
At the other end of the spectrum was A History of the World since 1300 by Princeton University, also hosted by Coursera, which reportedly recruited 83,000 students with just 0.8 per cent reaching the end.

Read the Complete Article
See Also: MOOC Completion Rates by Katy Jordan
See Also: Katy Jordan’s Blog, MoocMoocher

Filed under: Data Files, News