(Dis)Organization and Success in an Economics MOOC

Massive Open Online Courses have experienced a fast cycle of hype and disappointment. In November 2012, the New York Times proclaimed 2012 to be the year of the MOOC. The excitement was based on the promise that the world can now have access to a wide variety of courses from the best universities. However, on December 12, 2013, a Washington Post article headline was “Are MOOCs already over?”. The main problem that MOOCs face is that few users actually complete the class. For example, a widely publicized study by the Graduate School of Education at UPenn based on a million participants in the first seventeen UPenn courses offered on the Coursera platform finds that only 5% of those who register for a class actually complete the course (Ahmad et al., 2013). The number is somewhat misleading, since a substantial fraction of those who register are never active on the site (in the sense of viewing one lecture or completing one problem set). Across all UPenn courses, only half of those who registered viewed at least one lecture within their selected course. This might just reflect a version of the shopping around for classes as is common in brick and mortar colleges. It is very possible that in the case of MOOCs, poten-