4.1 Prevalence rate
At Harvard University, a comprehensive statistics to their own MOOCs was published. This statistics is representative for
nearly all providers. In total 2,710,444 people from 195 countries have registered for one of their courses. Details are
visualised in an interactive map illustrates the estimated enrolment numbers from each country for all HarvardX
offerings Nesterko et al, 2014.
Figure 10. The top 25 countries, by numbers of registrants, for all HarvardX and MITx registrants. Ho et all, 2014
Figure 10 ranks the top 25 countries by the numbers of registrants Ho, 2014. It’s not surprising that most of the
participants come from the USA. This fact is directly linked to the structures of the American higher education system because
students emerge immensely high cost to achieve an academic degree. This pressure does not exist in most European countries,
the interest in participating open online courses is much lower. Developing countries and emerging nations, however, benefit
from the opportunities that arise from MOOCs and use these courses much more frequently.
4.2 MOOC user profile
MOOCs contribute to the democratisation of education – this was one substantial argument at the beginning of the MOOC
wave. But statistics point out that the offer doesn’t expand access to higher education to those who do not already have the
means to obtain it. A study of students participating in Penn’s Coursera courses proved this apprehension Christensen et al.,
2013. The authors of the study received 34,779 completed responses from individuals having watched at least one course
lecture. As listed in table 1 the majority of participants worldwide is employed full-time or self-employed. A main
difference between Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa BRICS and developing countries in contrast to US and
OECD nations concerns the age: nearly two thirds of students are under age of 30. The survey also revealed that across all
geographic regions, MOOC students have very high levels of educational attainment: 83.0 of students a post-secondary
degree 2 or 4 years, 79.4 of students have a Bachelor’s degree or higher and 44.2 report education beyond a
Bachelor’s degree. These results are confirmed by the survey at Harvard Ho et al, 2014.
Table 1. Penn State University – Students’ statistic
4.3 The dropout rate