Demographics on GT’s first Coursera MOOC: Computational Investing by Tucker Balch
January 29, 2013 at 1:04 am 8 comments
My colleague Tucker Balch posted on his blog the detailed demographics of his Coursera MOOC (the first at Georgia Tech), “Computational Investing.” He got 41% of the completers to respond to his survey, but only 2.6% of those who enrolled but did not complete. That’s a remarkable response rate, so it’s a great snapshot into who completes a course like this.
A big caveat up-front: This is “Computational Investing.” It’s clearly an elective subject, so we would expect demographics to shift from what we might hope to see in a required course (like CS1 or data structures) or a common upper-level course (like AI).
Some of the results that I found intriguing:
- I predicted that CS course MOOC completers would be 80% white or Asian and 90% male. I underestimated. Tucker’s course was 88.6% white or Asian and 91% male.
- 73.3% of completers came from OECD countries (as a measure of “developed”), and half of those were from the US. So, were the completers people who couldn’t get access to higher education otherwise? Nope. Over 10% had their PhD’s, and over 40% had their Master’s degree. Less than 10% of the completers only had a high school degree.
- The discussion forums were not how most students asked questions. Everyone reads (over 95%), but only 33% post — which is pretty similar to the lack of participation that we documented years ago in engineering courses using Wikis. That doesn’t mean that the collaboration forums aren’t contributing to learning, but it does mean that it’s not substituting for discussion in the classroom.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, computing education research, MOOCopalypse, MOOCs, NCWIT.
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Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
Jeff Rick | January 29, 2013 at 8:08 am
Go Tucker for making this stuff available! Doing a survey of demographics before the start of the course could combat the abysmal 2.6% response rate for dropping students. That’s too low to assume that it is a representative sample. There are potentially interesting things there (6% of completers identify as female while 11% of the dropouts identify as female) but that could just indicate that women are more likely to answer a survey for a course that they dropped. Given how reluctant certain groups are to answering surveys, even the 41% might be too low to infer any meaning about demographic data for these groups.
2.
Steve Tate | January 29, 2013 at 9:47 am
An overall completion rate of 4.8%??? And over 50% of those already have graduate degrees (MS or PhD)? I believe that reports of the death of the university are greatly exaggerated. MOOCs intrigue me – not because I think they offer any sort of substitute to what I provide for my students, but because I always loved being a student and taking classes from people who really knew their subject. I would love to take the Computational Investing class. Or the Quantum Computing class the Umesh Vazirani is offering. If I had time I’d be one of those people with graduate degrees that take the classes.
But as an alternative for an average undergraduate student? An impending MOOCopalypse? Not even close. I think a lot of the excitement about MOOCs from academics comes from people who go “oh that’s so cool – I’d love to do that” – falling into the all-too-common trap of thinking that our students are like us (and, to be blunt, except possibly at the top universities, our students are nothing like us — nor do they need to be).
What I hope comes from all of this are better outside materials – supplementing (not necessarily replacing) textbooks, and it would be cool to have larger multi-university discussions of core topics. The 33% participation in class discussion forums scaled to even just 1,000 students across multiple universities offers some real intriguing possibilities (and is actually a higher percentage than I get in either online discussions or voluntary participation in in-class discussions, although that’s probably a topic for another day). Maybe what we need is to coordinate face-to-face classes run somewhat in sync, and can take advantage of these technologies. But it would definitely be a supplement – the people who are “in charge” would be local to each face-to-face class, where they know the students and directly interact with the students.
3.
Fred Martin (@fgmart) | January 31, 2013 at 5:51 pm
It’s intriguing that the profiles of completers and non-completers look pretty much the same — at least, for age and education level.
It’s like the beginning of each semester, when everything seems possible, and all good intentions are entertained…
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5.
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6.
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7.
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8.
Philip Guo | September 17, 2014 at 11:08 am
Also, the summary stats for demographics of *completers* are even more skewed than for the general participant pool:
– 92% of completers were white or Asian
– 94% were male
– 58% held either master’s or Ph.D.