The HarvardX Working Papers consists of papers and reports that give researchers and the broader public access to current research findings from the HarvardX research organization. HarvardX Working Papers are generally written by HarvardX researchers, or their collaborators, and they use HarvardX data to inform the learning of students on and off campus.

Building our prior work describing the first two years of open online courses launched on edX, this study reviews four years of data and represents one of the largest surveys of MOOCs: spanning 290 MIT and Harvard online courses, a quarter-million certifications, 4.5 million participants and 28 million participant-hours. The report offers key insights into learner engagement and behavior, including findings on cumulative trends in participation and certification, course participation and demographics, flow of participants between courses, and teachers as course participants.

HarvardX and MITx: Two Years of Open Online, Courses Fall 2012-Summer 2014
What happens when well-known universities offer online courses, assessments, and certificates of completion for free? Early descriptions of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emphasized large enrollments, low certification rates, and highly educated registrants. We use data from two years and 68 open online courses offered by Harvard University (via HarvardX) and MIT (via MITx) to broaden the scope of answers to this question. We describe trends over this two-year span, depict participant intent using comprehensive survey instruments, and chart course participation pathways using network analysis. We find that overall participation in our MOOCs remains substantial and that the average growth has been steady. We explore how diverse audiences — including explorers, teachers-as-learners, and residential students — provide opportunities to advance the principles on which HarvardX and MITx were founded: access, research, and residential education.

HarvardX and MITx: The First Year of Open Online Courses
The first two HarvardX open online courses launched on the edX platform in October 2012; four more courses launched in Spring 2013. This report, and its companion course reports, examine these initial six course offerings - alongside the initial 11 MITx courses - in order to inform ongoing course design and research. Now that data has been delivered and analyzed, it is an ideal time to examine these initial offerings in order to inform ongoing course design and research. This summary report addresses simple questions across multiple courses: Who registered? What did they do? Where are they from? We strongly encourage reading these reports as a package to understand the full story of the HarvardX and MITx initiative in its first year.

Computer-Assisted Reading and Discovery for Student Generated Text in Massive Open Online Courses
Dealing with the vast quantities of text that students generate in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a daunting challenge. Computational tools are needed to help instructional teams uncover themes and patterns as MOOC students write in forums, assignments, and surveys. This paper introduces to the learning analytics community the Structural Topic Model, an approach to language processing that can (1) find syntactic patterns with semantic meaning in unstructured text, (2) identify variation in those patterns across covariates, and (3) uncover archetypal texts that exemplify the documents within a topical pattern. We show examples of computationally-aided discovery and reading in three MOOC settings: mapping students’ self-reported motivations, identifying themes in discussion forums, and uncovering patterns of feedback in course evaluations.

Source: harvardx.harvard.edu