Working up a few quick statistics:<p>- Of the people that finished a course, male students had an average grade of 83.8%, female students had an average grade of 82.7%.<p>- The correlation between the grade of students who finished a course and the usage of supplemental materials is positive, but weak (0.16 for each variable, except for forum posts, which are complete uncorrelated with grade).<p>- The easiest course was HarvardX/CS50x/2012, with a perfect 100% average grade from all students who finished the course [EDIT: this course has pass/fail assignments]. The hardest was HarvardX/CB22x/2013_Spring, with an average score of 73.3% (the class, unsurprisingly, is about Ancient Greek Heroes)<p>- The course with the highest completion rate (# completed / # registered) is MITx/14.73x/2013_Spring at 7.48% (The Challenges of Global Poverty). The worst completion rate is HarvardX/CS50x/2012 at 0.07% (Introduction to Computer Science I, note that this is also the most registered course by a large margin)<p>- All classes have more male students than female students. The class with the highest Male/Female ratio is MITx/2.01x/2013_Spring at 17:1 (Elements of Structures). The class with the lowest ratio is HarvardX/PH278x/2013_Spring at 1.03:1 (Human Health and Global Environmental Change)<p>Let me know if you have any statistical ideas.
FYI, just in case you don't want to go through the (short) signup process to see what's in the data.<p>This is what the first 10 lines of the CSV file look like:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/4d372986b74ff087927a" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/4d372986b74ff087927a</a><p>Here's the output of `wc -l`<p><pre><code> 641139 1092627 70165566 HMXPC13_DI_v2_5-14-14.csv
</code></pre>
Here's a mirror of the file [9.6MB]: <a href="http://danwin-files.s3.amazonaws.com/data/nf/HMXPC13_DI_v2_5-14-14.zip" rel="nofollow">http://danwin-files.s3.amazonaws.com/data/nf/HMXPC13_DI_v2_5...</a>
There's been a lot of discussion about the "completion rates" in online courses. A study in January reported that "only 4 percent of people who register for MOOCs actually finish them" but that "MOOCs still have considerable impact" because "nearly two-thirds got at least something out of the experience." [1]<p>One possible solution to this - instead of measuring progress against a single completion date, split courses up into a continuous series of milestones or smaller units. A student could cover 1 or more units.<p>While it's true some courses are considered prerequisites for others, the requirements could be made more granular (e.g.: course B unit 4 requires course A units 5 and 6). Discovering these dependencies could potentially be automated by text data mining the course material.<p>Courses are designed around a traditional college semester and reflect the amount of material that can be reasonably covered in that time period. However, that constraint shouldn't necessarily be the benchmark for all study programs.<p>[1] <a href="http://hechingerreport.org/content/harvard-mit-despite-low-completion-rates-moocs-work_14495/" rel="nofollow">http://hechingerreport.org/content/harvard-mit-despite-low-c...</a>
My problem with MOOCs is immediacy: I'm interested <i>now</i> and I don't want to delay that over <i>x</i> weeks, beginning at <i>y</i> point in the future. Hell, I often don't know what country I'm going to be in, let alone whether I'll have free time and an internet connection. So for my lifestyle, the relatively simple mapping from traditional tertiary course formats across to MOOCs is fundamentally flawed one, though I believe they are improving these days by offering access to all materials immediately. Another thing is downloads ... I just want everything, please. I'm often offline, as I believe many developing country learners may be. I don't want to have to register, log in, then painfully click through everything bit by bit. I want bittorrent with early-to-late material download priority. (Otherwise, maybe someone should start developing a converted and open courseware format to share on PirateBoxes? <a href="http://piratebox.cc/" rel="nofollow">http://piratebox.cc/</a>)