Curriculum·G701 How to Teach This Material·about 34 min
The Academy's methods, and why each one exists
By the end of this lesson you can
- →State the measured completion rate of the largest open online courses and what it did over six years, with the source
- →Name each of the Academy's design principles and standing rules, and the failure each one was written against
- →Compute what a 3.13 percent completion rate means for a cohort, and what a course that gates nothing gains and loses by it
- →Teach any lesson in this Academy from its own structure: autopsy, objectives, worked example, misconception, cards, items, and say what each part is for
Graduate · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with The MOOC pivot, Science, 11 January 2019.
- What happened
- Justin Reich and José Ruipérez-Valiente analyzed all the courses taught on edX by MITx and HarvardX from the start in 2012 to May 2018: 261 courses, 565 course iterations, 12.67 million registrations from 5.63 million learners. Among all participants, 3.13 percent completed their course in 2017 to 2018, down from about 4 percent in each of the two previous years and nearly 6 percent in 2014 to 2015. Of those who registered, 52 percent never entered the courseware, and the vast majority of learners never returned after their first year. Growth in participation had concentrated almost entirely in the world's most affluent countries. Low completion rates had not improved over six years, and the authors concluded that the providers had pivoted from teaching the world to helping universities offer online professional master's degrees.
- The decision point
- The promise had been that free, open, high-quality courses from the best universities would educate the world. The courses were free, open and from those universities, and in no year measured did more than 6 in 100 participants finish; in the last year, 97 in 100 did not. In this lesson's reading, quality of content was not the constraint. The constraint was that nothing in the design held a learner to the work: no cohort, no practical, no standard, no person who would notice an absence. This Academy's lessons are free and open too, and it faces the same number. What it does about it, the gates, the cards, the assessors, the placement diagnostic, is the answer this lesson lays out, and a teacher who understands the 3.13 percent understands why none of those parts is optional.
What you will be able to answer
- →What was the MOOC completion rate, and what did it do over six years?
- →What holds a learner to the work, per this Academy's design?
- →What are the parts of a lesson, and what is each for?
- →What are the six design principles referenced by id?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav7958
- https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/16/study-offers-data-show-moocs-didnt-achieve-their-goals
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30630920/
- https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/136215
Confidence high·Volatility low·Reviewed 2026-09-14·Owner unassigned
Contested
Completion is not the only outcome a free open course produces; many participants sample deliberately and leave satisfied. The lesson uses the rate as a measure of what a design without a cohort, a practical or an assessor holds a learner to, not as a verdict on the participants.
Among verified learners, who paid for a certificate, completion was 46 percent in 2017 to 2018 and 56 percent the year before. That is consistent with the lesson's argument that commitment matters, but it is mostly self-selection: the study did not assign anyone to pay, and the authors do not attribute the gap to design.
The claim that content quality was not the constraint is this lesson's reading of the figures. The authors report the patterns and the pivot; they do not test content quality.
This Academy has not yet published its own completion figures, because the enrolled years are new. When it does, they belong in this lesson, whatever they are, per P6.