HarvardX Participation and Completion Rates Vary by Discipline, Study Says

This story originally appeared in The Harvard Crimson.

The participation and completion rates of online courses offered by the Harvard and MIT branches of online learning platform edX varied across academic areas, according to a recent report based on two years of course data.

The study reviewed data on HarvardX and MITx, subsets of a virtual learning platform founded jointly by the two universities in 2012. Covering data spanning from fall 2012 to summer 2014, the report analysis included 68 courses, 1.7 million participants, and 1.1 billion logged events, or “clicks.”

According to the study, growth in course participation has been steady, with around 1,300 new participants joining a HarvardX or MITx course per day. The report defined “participants” as registrants who accessed any chapter of course content, according to Andrew D. Ho, chair of the HarvardX research committee and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education...

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