A new study from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported students who complete massive
open online courses (MOOCs) are learning something, regardless of how prepared
they are coming into the course. Researchers found that all students who took
an MIT physics course offered on the edX platform in the summer of 2013 showed signs
of learning the subject, as long as they spent time doing the work.
“There was no evidence
that cohorts with low initial ability learned less than the other cohorts,” the
researchers wrote in the paper, which was published by The
International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning.
Researchers also found that
students taking the MOOC learned at a similar rate to MIT students taking the
on-campus version of the class. Less-prepared students did earn significantly
lower scores than their better-prepared counterparts, but their learning progress
was the same, according to David E. Pritchard, a researcher on the study.
“If they stuck it out,
they learned,” Pritchard told The Chronicle of Higher Education.