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While Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may allow free education on an enormous scale, one of the biggest criticisms raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.
Via Peter B. Sloep
The best collection of numbers related to mooc participation I've seen - so far. 'Participation' is a difficult thing to identify and define in the original cMOOC formats, where it is possible to visit without signing in so whilst unique visitor numbers can be extracted for the core site, engagement is difficult/ not possible to ascertain for these mooc formats. It is much clearer in xMOOCs, where sign-in is required and often fixed assignments are presented. In addition, in cMOOCs, and especially in the longer lasting ones (e.g. the 9 month #Change11) the notion of 'participation' isn't based on weekly attendance but on accessing those resources and conversations of interest to that participant.
So evaluating retention may be an illusion other than for some xMOOCs.
The comments on this blog are worth a careful read, they open discussion on many of the more nuanced points around completion v participation v 'persistence'. The language used to discuss this is not trivial, as some terms shift responsibility for performance between provider and learner.