Education Policy, Business and Technology

The Challenge of Understanding MOOC Data

Campus Technology: Plenty of scholarly research has come out about massive open online courses since edX's official introduction in 2012. What's lesser covered is how the institutions running the MOOCs have used the data to improve learning in their regular courses. Part of the reason for that is that the colleges and universities involved in edX don't necessarily have the resources — expertise, tools or understanding — to exploit the torrents of data their courses generate.

That isn't true for every edX partner. For example, the founders of edX, Harvard University and MIT, signed a legal agreement early on to share their findings, data and tools. The two schools hold research meetings bi-weekly, said Dustin Tingley, political science professor and faculty director for Vice Provost for Advances in Learning (VPAL) research at Harvard; they also regularly trade code. "This isn't just a sharing environment of data but also a sharing environment of infrastructure and the tools that help us utilize that data," he added. "That's been a very special relationship."

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