MOOCs in Decline: Insights into multi-year data from MIT and Harvard

It is no secret that the commercial Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) launched by Coursera, Udacity, and edX in 2011/12 are a different beast from the majority of for-credit online education offerings. One such difference is the pattern of quick drop-off of students within each course, particularly in the first 2 – 3 weeks, which we documented in 2013.