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MarchApril2014

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68 March/April 2014 BizEd Fuse /Th i n ksTock technology A study from the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education shows that massive open online courses still inspire low levels of student engagement as a percent- age of total initial enrollments. The number of active users decreases dramatically after the first one or two weeks. Co-authors Laura Perna, Alan Ruby, Robert Boruch, Nicole Wang, Janie Scull, Chad Evans, and Seher Ahmad analyzed the movement of 1 million users through 16 MOOCs that the University of Pennsylvania offered from June 2012 to June 2013. All offered via the Coursera plat- form, the courses were on topics ranging from gamification and microeconomics to mythology, poetry, and genome sci- ence. The number of students enrolled in each course ranged from more than 110,000 for "Introduction to Operations Management" to about 13,000 for "Rationing and Allocat- ing Scarce Medical Resources." The research was supported by the MOOC Research Ini- tiative, which is funded by the Gates Foundation and admin- istered through Athabasca University, as well as a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Some of the study's find- ings are highlighted on this page. most users still Abandon mooCs Share of registrants in business-related MOOCs who accessed content within one week of course end: Introduction to Operations Management ........ 2% Gamification .......................... 6% Principles of Macroeconomics ................. 7% Share of students with final grades above 80% Principles of Macroeconomics ................. 2% Introduction to Operations Management ........ 3% Gamification .......................... 8% Number of students by countries of origin* U.S. ..............................50,000 India .............................24,000 Brazil ............................15,000 U.K. ..............................13,000 *numbers are approximate 4% Average overall completion rate 6% Average completion rate for "low-workload" courses

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