Understanding Persistence in Massive Open Online Courses: Descriptive and Experimental Evidence

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Abstract

In an effort to understand persistence patterns within MOOCs, this study makes three contributions to the emerging literature on MOOCs. First, using descriptive data from nine Coursera courses, it provides an overview of student participation patterns in range of subjects. Second, it uses ip addresses to demonstrate where enrolled students are located and integrates GIS data to provide demographic characteristics of these areas. Finally, it presents the results of an experiment which asked a random subset of students to commit to a time for watching the first lecture. Preliminary results from these analyses indicate that dropout patterns are fairly consistent across courses and that being asked to precommit to watching the first lecture videos did not improve uptake.

Authors

• Rachel Baker, Stanford University

• Brent Joseph Evans, Vanderbilt University

• Erica Hilary Greenberg, Stanford University

• Thomas Dee, Stanford University