The advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has created opportunities for learning that are clearly in high demand, but the direction in which MOOCs should evolve to best meet the interests and needs of learners is less apparent. edx2bigquery is being adopted by other institutions with an aim toward future collaboration. This framework makes it feasible for edx2bigquery to be open source, following standards which emphasize the importance of data products that transcend a particular data science platform and allow teams with diverse backgrounds to interact with data. For this application, we find that Google BigQuery provides ease of use in loading the multi-faceted MOOC datasets and near real-time interactive querying of data, including large clickstream datasets moreover, we are able to provide flexible research and reporting dashboards, visualizing and aggregating data, by interfacing services associated with BigQuery. This paper details the functionality of edx2bigquery - an open source Python package developed by Harvard and MIT to ingest and report on hundreds of MITx and HarvardX course datasets from edX, making use of Google BigQuery to handle multiple terabytes of learner data. The size and complexity of MOOC data present overwhelming challenges to many institutions. These findings suggests that some other incentives, other than simply the sunk-cost of paying for a verified certificate-track, may motivate learners to complete MOOC courses. Access to free-certificates was associated with somewhat lower certification rates, but overall certification rates remained high particularly among those who viewed the courses. In Case Study #2, we compare the behaviors of learners within the same courses based on whether they received access to a free-certificate track. In the courses with a free-certificate track, participants signed up for the verified certificate track at higher rates and completion rates among verified students were higher than in the paid-certificate track courses. In Case Study #1, we compare participation and certification rates between courses with and without coupons for free-certificates. We report on two case studies where cohorts of learners were offered coupons for free-certificates to explore price reductions might influence user behavior in MOOC-based online learning settings. The relationship between pricing and learning behavior is an increasingly important topic in MOOC (massive open online course) research.
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