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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

"Preliminary results of a study of 16 massive open online courses offered through the University of Pennsylvania show that only a small percentage of people who start the courses finish them-and that, on average, only half of those who register for the courses even watch the first lecture. The study, conducted by the university's Graduate School of Education, is reviewing data from about a million users of the courses, which Penn offered on the Coursera platform, from June 2012 to June 2013. Two of the seven researchers involved-Laura W. Perna, a professor of higher education, and Alan Ruby, senior fellow for international education-described the study on Thursday in a presentation at the MOOC Research Conference now under way in Arlington, Tex."

"Key findings from the report include: When publishers bundle a textbook with an access code, it eliminates most opportunities for students to cut costs with the used book market. Of the access code bundles in our sample, forty-five percent-nearly half-were unavailable from any other source we could find except the campus bookstore. This eliminated student's ability to shop around and meant that they were forced to pay full price for these materials. For the classes using bundles, students would likely be stuck paying full price, whereas for the classes using a textbook only, students could cut costs up to fifty-eight percent by buying used online. Schools that have invested in open educational resources (OER) generated significant savings for their students. OER are educational materials that can be downloaded or accessed for free online while carrying many other benefits for students and professors. For example, in Massachusetts, Greenfield Community College's use of OER in three of the six courses in our study meant that students there could spend as little as $31 per course on materials, compared to a national average of $153 per course. Switching the ten introductory classes in our study to OER nationwide would save students $1.5 billion per year in course materials costs."

"Students who use OER find them to be accessible, relevant, and engaging. Over 60 percent of students reported that the overall quality of their learning experience in an OER course was higher in comparison to a typical, non- OER course. Though creating OER courses and degrees is time consuming, instructors in several colleges said they had made changes in instruction as a result of working with OER materials. Though few instructors made changes to their pedagogical practices specific to OER, use of these materials allowed them to align materials better with their learning goals. Instructors already using student-centered and hands-on learning strategies said that the OER materials helped what they were already doing. Several instructors also reported that students were more engaged with OER materials compared to textbooks, because they are better tailored to good pedagogy, reading materials are more relevant and interesting, and students can be more involved in the construction of the learning experience."

"Understanding how time "works" in online courses can be a challenge for instructors: How do I determine the total time on task expected of students? How can I calculate the time students will need to complete course work? What should students be doing to accomplish course goals and learning outcomes? What should I be doing with my time as online instructor?  "

"David-John Palmer, an instructor at FIU and associate director of educational technology at FIU Online, has spearheaded the recent AI initiative in his own Introduction to Information Systems course in partnership with Cognii Inc., a leading provider of AI-based educational technologies. His course, offered through the College of Business, is the first online FIU course to feature AI in instructional design."

"To streamline online course development, the ID Team at CIRT uses course templates to develop online courses for programs transitioning to fully-online."

"In-depth ideas about the behavior of students in the course and predicts future trends. Research-based on algorithms to calculate measures; for instance, entries to the platform, staying in a course, social connections, forum discussions, linguistic analysis of the use of the words that students say, and comparative analysis of courses. Ideas about the problems of the course so that instructors they can take immediate action."

"The success of San Jose State University's (SJSU) incorporation of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) into their curriculum is indisputable: in side-by-side comparisons of two traditionally-taught sections of an introductory electrical engineering course with an edX-provided MOOC variant, the pass rates went from 55-59 percent to 91 percent.[1] This mirrors results that the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University has been achieving for years. However, interestingly, SJSU incorporated MOOCs as a course supplement in a flipped classroom. If you think about that, it is the beginning of disaggregation of MOOCs into technological (big data), content and pedagogical (peer learning) components."

"Professors typically don't worry about what price point an online course will sell at, or what amenities might attract a student to pick one course over another. But a new online platform, Professor Direct, lets instructors determine not only how much to charge for such courses, but also how much time they want to devote to services like office hours, online tutorials, and responding to students' e-mails."

"MOOCs are characterized by their openness, enabling anyone across the world with an Internet connection to participate.  As a result, most MOOCs have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of participants. An online course with potentially tens of thousands of students is a very different teaching environment than face-to-face courses or even "traditional" online courses.  Teaching strategies practiced in other teaching contexts won't necessarily translate well to this context. Indeed, the sets of choices regarding learning objectives, content presentation, assessment, and instructor-to-student and student-to-student interaction are still being developed in this emergent teaching environment."

"Prices for a "tutor" vary. Boostmygrades.com advertises a $695 rate for graduate classes, $495 for an algebra class, or $95 for an essay. When Inside Higher Ed, posing as a potential customer, asked for a quote for an introductory microeconomics class offered by Penn State World Campus, noneedtostudy.com offered to complete the entire course for $900, with payment upon completion, and onlineclasshelpers.com asked for $775, paid up front. Most sites promise at least a B in the course."

"Designing a course that precludes cheating might require thinking creatively and breaking away from simply uploading lecture videos and administering quizzes, said Kyle Johnson, an independent higher ed consultant. "What kind of experience are we providing for students if someone is able to take an entire class for a student and we never figure it out from the interaction? At a pedagogical level, that's my concern," he said. "Are we really just dumping information at them so someone can come in and take a couple of quizzes and they're done?""

Digital badges are receiving a growing amount of attention and are beginning to disrupt the norms of what it means to earn credit or be credentialed. Badges allow the sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a wide range of life activity, at a granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning-even outside the classroom. As such, entities not traditionally in the degree-granting realm-such as museums, associations, online communities, and even individual experts-are now issuing "credit" for achievement they can uniquely recognize. At the same time, higher education institutions are rethinking the type and size of activities worthy of official recognition. From massive open online courses (MOOCs), service learning, faculty development, and campus events to new ways of structuring academic programs and courses or acknowledging the granular or discrete skills that these programs explore, there's much for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.

During last month's round of School of Open courses, I helped out with a facilitated version of the Open Science course supported by Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and PLOS. On four Tuesdays in August, Billy Meinke hosted online discussions with a handful of well-known members of the open science community while participants from around the world completed course modules and blogged about their experiences. Here's how things went down.

"In a student-centric LMS, the core abstraction of the LMS is the student. In the diagram, I'm imagining a student with control of connections to other entities within the system. These could be instructors, or other students, or learning materials. To create a course, you invite students to connect with a common set of resources, one or more instructors, and the other students in the course. When the course is complete, the student can drop the connections she doesn't need any more - but keep the rest. As the educational experience proceeds, the student collects, under her control, the connections that remain meaningful and useful and drops the ones that are stale or irrelevant. Furthermore, these resources could be local and within the LMS, or they could be external to the LMS or to the student's current institution."

"The Copyright Crash Course was created by Georgia Harper and is currently maintained by UT Libraries. The Course is arranged into several sections that allow users to explore certain areas of copyright law individually or as a group. The Course was originally created with faculty in mind, but can be used by anyone who is interested in understanding and managing their copyrights."

"CourseTalk is what you might expect - an early stage Yelp for MOOCs - a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they'd enjoy. Given that it's still nascent, the platform's design is simple and its user experience is straightforward: Visitors can use the general search bar which is front and center, or peruse through "Top Rated," "Popular" and "Upcoming" verticals, or search by category, like Business, Computer Science, etc."

"On Tuesday, San Jose State University announced an unusual pilot project with Udacity, a for-profit provider of the massive open online courses, to jointly create three introductory mathematics classes. The courses will be free online, but students who want credit from San Jose State will be able to take them for just $150, far less than the $450 to $750 that students would typically pay for a credit-bearing course."

"More than six million students are currently enrolled in online courses. There are now massive open online courses (MOOCs), in which universities and technology companies partner to design courses for thousands of students. Selingo also discusses how two colleges, the traditional Southern New Hampshire University and the newly developed Western Governors University (see John Gravois, "The College For-profits Should Fear," Washington Monthly, September/October 2011), are experimenting with competency-based online associate's degree programs, in which students are credited as soon as they show mastery of a subject rather than having to spend a set number of hours in class."

WCC will offer two classes next semester with readings available online for free instead of textbooks with high price tags. The courses - one reading course and one math course - typically have high enrollment and high textbook costs. The offerings are part of the Kaleidoscope Project, a grant-based initiative funded by Next Generation Learning Challenges.