Who sticks with a MOOC? The impact of selected demographics on course retention

The audience participating in Mass Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is very diverse in terms of age, occupation, motivation and country of provenience. Self-selection, the presence of close substitutes, time and income constraints may lead to different elasticities of retention for participants with different demographic traits. Do these characteristics matter and can they predict attrition throughout the course? We use the Cox proportional hazard model to analyze student retention in the MOOC Principle of Microeconomics. We measure dropping out of the course in two ways: no longer watching videos and no longer submitting quizzes. Demographic data were collected through a voluntary opt-in survey. We observe that participants to the survey are more likely to stay in the course, providing some evidence for positive self-selection. We find a higher dropout rate for college students or younger participants, despite the course being closely structured on a successful live class attended mostly by freshman 18-year-old students. This suggests that MOOCs still need to develop before becoming substitutes to traditional colleges. Female attrition is larger for full-time workers but smaller for part-time workers, unemployed and graduate students. The result points to gender selection into these occupational categories. It is also consistent with women being more time constrained than men. We observe a higher dropout rate for enrollees from the USA. Selection and the availability of close substitutes may play a role in this outcome: for example, American college students can attend a similar Microeconomics course in their own university, differently from other countries. By the same reasoning, we would expect students from poorer countries to stay longer in the course, since this is a unique opportunity for them to access high-level tertiary education. However, they are actually more likely to drop out. This suggests that obstacles in logistics or technology still prevent people in less developed countries from taking full advantage of the MOOC revolution.