What students learned from an MIT physics MOOC

By Tony Bates. I’m still not sure from reading the paper how much students actually learned from the MOOC. About 1,000 who finished the course got a certificate, but it is difficult to interpret the gain in knowledge. The statistical measurement of an average gain of 0.3 doesn’t mean a lot. There is some mention of the difference being between a B and a B+, but I have probably misinterpreted that. If it is the case, though, I certainly would expect students taking a 13 week course to do much better than that. It would have been more helpful to have graded students on the pre-test then compared those grades on the post-test. We could then see if gains were in the order of at least one grade better, for instance. Read more...