Mapping student engagement in a massive open online course (MOOC)

The massive open online course (MOOC) has appeared as an alternative form of distance instruction designed to scale to global audiences. Although a fair amount is known regarding who takes MOOCs, we know much less about the geography of MOOC student engagement beyond survey results that summarize students’ home countries. This paper characterizes spatial patterns of learner engagement in MOOCs by mapping students' locations, attributes, and learning behaviors from a cartography MOOC offered by Penn State University titled Maps and the Geospatial Revolution. We associate course participation statistics with student locations (geocoded using IP addresses) and summarize the results using choropleth maps featuring hexagonal bins. The resulting maps show rural and urban differences in participation across countries and continents at a level of granularity not previously depicted in the MOOC literature. Themes we explore include course enrollment, course completion, engagement with course forums, gender distribution, and percentage of students "dropping out" of the course after the first exam. These findings can help online educators to better understand student behaviors in massive, global courses.