MITx 6.00x through the numbers

The following visualizations accompany my work-in-progress paper accepted for presentation at the ACM Learning at Scale conference. They are based on anonymized data that I received from the MIT Office of Digital Learning for the course MITx 6.00X. This course was offered twice, with only a three-week break between the offerings. The course is not being offered in the same format anymore, and it has been replaced by a two-parts course, 6.00.1x and 6.00.2x, included in the edX XSeries for Computer Science. The data span a time period of almost one year, from July 2012 to June 2013. These graphs can be better understood if one also reads the paper.

Visits from 'no-shows' in Fall 2012
'no-shows' are users who only sign-up for the course and never login for any other activity.

The total number of users in this graph is 84,853. 46% of them (39,514 users) signed-up before the course start date of Oct. 1st, 2012. A group of 26,782 users (32%) signed-up during the course duration, and 19,007 users (22%) continued to sign up even after the course was completed.


Visits from 'no-shows' in Spring 2013
'no-shows' are users who only sign-up for the course and never login for any other activity.

The graph uses the same time interval as Fall 2012 in the x-axis and the max value for y-axis, for comparison purposes. Unfortunately, our database is missing data for three weeks around the start date of Feb 4 (Jan 21 - Feb 10, 2013), as well as two weeks toward the end of the course, May 21 - June 9, 2013). The total number of users in this graph is 28,251.


How often did users visit the course website?
While 46% of all sign-ups were 'no-shows', the rest of users (99,381), visited the website on one or more days. We break down this group based on how many days a user visited the website. Since showing them all in one graph makes the graph unreadable, we divided the users in four groups: users who visited up to 10 days; between 10 to 20 days; between 20 to 40 days; more than 40 days.

Notice that the x and y axes in every plot have a different range of values. The label under each blue dot displays the exact number of users who visited for a certain number of days. For example, 19,035 users visited the website only on one day during the whole course duration. A large majority of users (78%), visited the website for 10 days or less during a duration of 112 days. However, a group of engaged users, visited the website for more than 40 days (7,161 users). Interestingly, 100% of users in this last group attempted the final exam.


How did participation spread over multiple weeks?
In addition to showing the daily visits of users, since the course covered a period of 16 weeks, we look at how users spread over this entire duration, with a cummulative histogram. The total number of users in this graph is 99,381, all sign-ups minus the 'no-shows'.

10% of these users participated for 10 or more weeks in the course (some of these weeks might fall outside of the course duration, since the website was available for a longer period). 35% of users (35,173) participated in four or more weeks [this statistic was referred to in the paper]. Also, 51% of the users showed up at most in two different weeks during the entire duration.