Small interventions, big effects: Closing the MOOC achievement gap

Tuesday, January 31, 2017 - 14:33 in Mathematics & Economics

Between 2012 and 2015, more than 25 million people enrolled in massive open online courses (MOOCs), including 39 percent from developing countries. While this democratization of educational opportunities is certainly worth celebrating, a team of researchers from MIT and Stanford University recently discovered that the benefits of MOOCs are not spread equitably across global regions. “The central problem we have in our educational systems is inequality. There are many great learning opportunities out there, they just aren’t equitably distributed,” explains study coauthor Justin Reich, who is the executive director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab and a research scientist within the MIT Office of Digital Learning. It’s tempting to chalk up this disparity to lack of broadband access or English-language proficiency. But the research team led by Stanford's Rene Kizilcec, Geoff Cohen, Andy Saltarelli, and MIT's Reich suggests another underappreciated cause: social identity threat. In “Closing the Global Achievement Gaps in MOOCs,” published...

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