EdX To Examine Personalized MOOC Experience

By Kristina D. Lorch. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s MOOC Research Initiative has granted HarvardX $21,450 to study how massive open online courses might be made more personalized for individuals in online courses everywhere, HarvardX announced Tuesday.
Led by Sergiy Nesterko, a HarvardX research fellow, and Svetlana I. Dotsenko ’10, founder of startup Project Lever, the study will take self-reported data from those enrolled in HarvardX classes, including country of origin, education level, gender, age, and usage of the course materials. The study will also look at individuals’ learning outcomes and goals.
“We want to...track how those goals manifest themselves in the students’ usage of courses, and ideally would see how those learning goals change over time and come up with a predictive system or a meaningful clustering of students,” Nesterko said in a phone interview.
The study will examine data from 17 HarvardX courses, five of which will have been completed before December 2013. More...