Curriculum·G706 Running a Cohort·about 31 min
Cohorts, completion and the honest number
By the end of this lesson you can
- →State the measured completion rate of the largest open courses and its trend, and say what a cohort changes about the design that produced it
- →Explain what a cohort is for, which of the design gaps in the open course it closes, and which it cannot
- →Compute the completion arithmetic for a cohort against the open rate, and set a completion figure you would publish before the cohort starts
- →Design a cohort's structure: size, cadence, the practical each session ends in, and the point at which a learner who has stopped is noticed
Graduate · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with The MOOC pivot, Science, 11 January 2019.
- What happened
- Justin Reich and José Ruipérez-Valiente analyzed every course taught on edX by MIT and Harvard from 2012 to 2018. 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. The great majority of learners never returned after their first year, growth in participation had concentrated in the world's most affluent countries, and the completion rate had not improved over six years. The authors read the providers' shift toward paid credentials and corporate training as a pivot away from the open model that had been promised.
- The decision point
- G701-04 read this paper for what it says about design. This lesson reads it for what it says about the thing a cohort is: a fixed group of people who start together, move on a schedule, produce something at each step, and are noticed when they stop. The open course had none of those, and its number was 3.13. A cohort has all four, and the temptation that follows is to promise a completion figure to match. The honest number is the one set before the cohort starts, from the design and from the last cohort's result, and published afterward whatever it turned out to be. A cohort that advertises what it hopes has become the school in G706-02.
What you will be able to answer
- →What is a cohort, as a design?
- →What sets a cohort's size?
- →What is the honest completion number?
- →What can a cohort not do?
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/
Confidence high·Volatility low·Reviewed 2026-09-14·Owner unassigned
Contested
This lesson and G701-04 share an autopsy by design: the same paper read for the Academy's structure there and for cohort design here. The measurement is the same; the decision point is different.
The Academy has not yet run a cohort and has no completion figure of its own. The worked example's cohort figures are illustrative and labeled; per P6 the first real cohort's number replaces them here.