Effect of Free Certificate Discontinuation in Completion Rates of MOOC

摘要

Completion rates have been a controversial topic since Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became mainstream in 2012. In January 2016, based in previous trials, edx.org discontinued the free honor code certificate for new courses, trying to increase the number of verified certificates sold. After one year we have studied the effects of this measure in completion rates and verified certification rates over enrollments for 24 UPValenciaX courses offered in 2015 and 2016 (199,278 enrollments in total), finding that there has been a modest global increase in verified certification rates and a strong decline in completion rates for all the courses. For exactly the same courses, the completion rate for all courses has practically halved going from 10.5% in 2015 to 5.6% and the total verified certification rate has been multiplied by 1.4 going from 0.7% to 1%, what is a significant relative improvement but it is not enough to achieve sustainability.