Surprising insights on student engagement in analysis of 17 courses
January 21, 2014
By Michael Patrick Rutter, Harvard Correspondent
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today released a series of working papers based on 17 online courses offered on the edX platform. Run in 2012 and 2013, the courses drew upon diverse topics — from ancient Greek poetry to electromagnetism — and an array of disciplines, including public health, engineering, and law.
The series features detailed reports about individual courses; these reports reveal differences and commonalities among massive open online courses (MOOCs). In the coming weeks, data sets and interactive visualization tools will also be made available.
Led by Andrew Ho of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Isaac Chuang of MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science and physics departments, the effort was in service of a mutual goal — “to research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online” — part of a mission statement established when MIT and Harvard joined to form edX, a nonprofit online learning platform, in May 2012.
To learn more:
- Course Reports
- Pilot Data Visualizations (created by Sergiy Nesterko, HarvardX Research Fellow)
- Courses on edX.org