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Reflections on Enrollment
Numbers and Success Rates at
the openHPI MOOC Platform
Christoph Meinel, Christian Willems, Jan Renz
and Thomas Staubitz
Abstract: openHPI is the educational Internet platform of the German Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), Potsdam. The HPI
offers massive open online courses covering different subjects in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on
the platform. Five courses have been concluded after one year of operation in German as well as in English, each with
enrollment numbers between 5,000 and 15,000 students. The paper at hand introduces the openHPI MOOC model
and presents a preliminary analysis of participation numbers and usage statistics from this first year. We differentiate
between total enrollment numbers and students actively taking part in the course, show the respective completion
rates and investigate student engagement throughout the course term. We also raise questions on the validity and
expressiveness of high enrollment numbers and low completion rates derived from these numbers as well as for a
resilient definition of activity in a massive open online course. Finally, we enrich the statements on participation and
completion rates with socio-demographic statistics regarding course completion differentiated by age and gender.
Introduction
With its openHPI platform1, the Hasso Plattner Institute
in Potsdam, Germany, is the first European university
institute to offer interactive online courses (MOOCs) in
German and English in the field of computer science and
IT technology. Due to long experience in e-learning technology
topics, including the development of the mobile
tele-TASK technology (an easy to use system to record
lectures and presentations for e-lecturing, see Schillings
and Meinel, 2002), the operation of a large lecture portal2
in the web, the development of different virtual labs3,
and regular lecture transmissions to the Technical University
of Beijing, China4, the HPI adopted the emerging
MOOC concept early and with the implementation of its
own learning platform. The key elements of the MOOC
innovation for online learning were quickly identified: the
synchronization of learners, the possibility of providing
the learning materials a little at a time, supplying various
feedback tools for self and external evaluations of learning
success and linking with a social platform to enable
learners the experience of being part of a social (albeit virtual)
learning community. Thus, openHPI offers MOOCs
of the Stanford kind, known as xMOOC.
As early as 2012 the much acclaimed first openHPI
course on “In-Memory Data Management” was launched
with Hasso Plattner (SAP co-founder and the founder
of HPI) as course instructor (see Fig. 1). In November
2012, Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel held the first xMOOC
in German lon “Internetworking with TCP/IP”. After that,
openHPI offered new courses basically every two months
(with two breaks during holidays), resulting in five concluded
courses after one year of operation.
1 See https://openhpi.de/
2 tele-TASK Portal, see http://www.tele-task.de/
3 See http://www.tele-lab.org/ and http://www.soa-security-lab.de/
4 Information at http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/meinel/knowledge_
tech/internet_bridge.html
Conception of the Online Courses
According to Meinel and Willems (2013), the online
courses offered at openHPI are didactically prepared in
accordance with specific guidelines. Courses have a fixed
start date and offer a balanced schedule of six consecutive
course weeks. Every course week is prepared in a multimedia
format and, whenever possible, interactive learning
material is supplied, dealing with a specific aspect of the
topic of the course. At the beginning of the week, course
participants are offered a series of videos that have been
recorded with the tele-TASK system. The videos are supplemented
with further reading material, interactive selftests
and homework to complete during that particular
week. The self-tests, which alternate with the videos, help
participants to check whether they have mastered the
most important information from the previous video. The
homework exercises at the end of each course week are
the building blocks for the performance evaluation of the
participants. Here, points can be accumulated relevant to
the successful completion of the course.
These offers are combined with a social discussion
platform where participants have the opportunity for
exchange with course instructors and other participants.
Here, they can get answers to questions and discuss topics
in depth. But naturally the type of learning activities
and their extent is up to the participants themselves.
The learners can make personal contributions to the
course, for example in blog posts, wiki pages, mind maps,
or other visualizations of the subject matter. Fellow learners
can comment on, discuss or expand on what has been
said. Through the discussion of the subject matter, the
participants become part of a virtual community with each
other and with the instructors, thus creating the links of a
social learning network.
Research Track | 101