The Inquiry MOOC is now in its 7th week…about half way through the course. The course opened with 200 participants registering prior to the 1st week. At the end of Week 1, 62 participants submitted a discussion rubric, 31% of those registered. Since then there has been a steady decline of 11%/per week of discussion submissions. As of the end of Week 6, 33 participants submitted discussions or 53% fewer than Week 1. In his article MOOCs and the Funnel of Participation, Chow describes the funnel of participation, with AWARENESS at the top, REGISTRATION below, then ACTIVITY and finally PROGRESS (Fi
gure 1). Chow has documented contributor rates of 1-2.4% for the MOOCs he has analyzed. He reminds readers that MOOCs generally have a completion rates of less than 10%; however some courses range between 30-67% completion rate. The INQUIRY MOOC currently has a contributor rate of 53%, but if current attrition trends prevail for each remaining week of the course, the projected contributor number at the end of the course will be 16 students, which is 8% of the 200 original registrants and within the range of projected MOOC completion as stated in the literature.
One item of interest was the Twitter Chat held in Week 3 of the course. It was well-received with approximately 12 participants. The discussion was rich, robust and many of the participants shared Twitter Chat highlights in their INQUIRY MOOC discussion posts. A second Twitter Chat was held during Week 5 of the course and only two participants joined. Perhaps weekly or biweekly regularly scheduled chats would help maintain interest.
We have been collecting participants’ reasons for dropping the MOOC and these will be included in the debrief at the end of the course.
