One of the characteristic features of Massive Open Online Courses is the observation that no matter how many students enroll in a course, only between 5 to 10% of them will ever complete it. Setting aside the argument of whether this actually means that MOOCs are considerably less “massive” than the name suggests, the interesting question is what is behind this high level of drop-outs and why does it seem so consistent?
To investigate this phenomenon further, a colleague and I at UWA collaborated with Stanford University and looked at MOOC activity for 42 of their courses that were run on Coursera. We assessed student activity by the simple measure of how many people watched each of the videos offered by each of the courses. It turned out that people belonged to one of two different groups and that these groups drop out of the courses in a remarkably consistent way.
The first group of MOOC students drop out quickly with half of them stopping after only 10% of the videos have been watched. In an average MOOC this means that half will have dropped out before they have watched the first week’s videos. The second group consist of those students who stick with it for longer and so their drop-out rate is slower. The pattern of student drop out of a typical course is shown in the following graph.
