Consistent pattern of participation in MOOCs revealed

A paper published in the Journal of Higher Education shows that participation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) follows a consistent pattern over time and illustrates the influence of course design on participation. The paper finds that MOOC participation decreases rapidly in the first week and remains relatively constant after that. It also shows that course design, such as sequencing of lectures and wording of lecture titles, can impact engagement, persistence, and completion. The findings build on a dataset consisting of 44 MOOCs and 2.1 million student observations.