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Effect of Free Certificate Discontinuation in Completion Rates of MOOC

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Digital Education: Out to the World and Back to the Campus (EMOOCs 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10254))

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Abstract

Completion rates have been a controversial topic since Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became mainstream in 2012. In January 2016, based in previous trials, edx.org discontinued the free honor code certificate for new courses, trying to increase the number of verified certificates sold. After one year we have studied the effects of this measure in completion rates and verified certification rates over enrollments for 24 UPValenciaX courses offered in 2015 and 2016 (199,278 enrollments in total), finding that there has been a modest global increase in verified certification rates and a strong decline in completion rates for all the courses. For exactly the same courses, the completion rate for all courses has practically halved going from 10.5% in 2015 to 5.6% and the total verified certification rate has been multiplied by 1.4 going from 0.7% to 1%, what is a significant relative improvement but it is not enough to achieve sustainability.

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References

  1. Jordan, K.: Massive open online course completion rates revisited: assessment, length and attrition. Int. Rev. Res. Open Distrib. Learn. [S.l.] 16(3) (2015). ISSN 1492-3831. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v16i3.2112. http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2112/3340. Accessed 15 Jan 2017

  2. Onah, D.F.O., Sinclair, J., Boyatt, R.: Dropout rates of massive open online courses: behavioural patterns. In: EDULEARN 2014 Proceedings, pp. 5825–5834 (2014). doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.2402.0009. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/research/csrmaj/daniel_onah_edulearn14.pdf. Accessed 15 Jan 2017

  3. Edx blog. http://blog.edx.org/news-about-edx-certificates. Accessed 15 Jan 2017

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  5. Curtin University: CurtinX Year in Review 2016 (2016). https://clt.curtin.edu.au/local/downloads/innovation/CurtinX_YearInReview2016_web.pdf. Accessed 31 Jan 2017

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

    Ignacio M. Despujol, Carlos Turró & Jaime Busquets

  2. Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Linda Castañeda

Authors
  1. Ignacio M. Despujol
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  2. Carlos Turró
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  3. Linda Castañeda
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  4. Jaime Busquets
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ignacio M. Despujol .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés (Madrid), Spain

    Carlos Delgado Kloos

  2. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Patrick Jermann

  3. Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, San Joaquín, Santiago de Chile, Chile

    Mar Pérez-Sanagustín

  4. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Daniel T. Seaton

  5. University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

    Su White

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© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

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Despujol, I.M., Turró, C., Castañeda, L., Busquets, J. (2017). Effect of Free Certificate Discontinuation in Completion Rates of MOOC. In: Delgado Kloos, C., Jermann, P., Pérez-Sanagustín, M., Seaton, D., White, S. (eds) Digital Education: Out to the World and Back to the Campus. EMOOCs 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10254. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59044-8_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59044-8_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-59043-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-59044-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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