How Are the MOOCs Doing?

About 95 percent of students enrolled in free, online courses from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropped them before getting a completion certificate.

Out of 841,687 registrants in 17 courses offered in 2012 and 2013 by the universities’ joint EdX program, 43,196 saw the classes to conclusion, according to an e-mailed statement from the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based schools. Some of the students signed up for multiple courses, according to the statement.

The researchers note that this doesn’t mean that online courses aren’t working — just that there were a lot of curious people who were browsing and dropping the courses as they became available and mentioned in the news cycle. Still, it seems like there still needs to be a lot of tweaking done. Maria Bustillos wrote about her experience with an online course last year and had mixed feelings. Anyone else tried signing up for these courses?

Photo: OCLC Research

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