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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
all openHPI courses and takes the submission number for
the first week’s homework as reference (100%).
participants’ engagement is steady and the dropout rate
low at about 1-2%.
In summary: participants who complete two or even
three weeks of an openHPI course are most likely and
willing to follow the course until the end and take the final
examination. This insight highlights the importance of
the course weeks one and two for course designers and
instructors who are challenged to pick up as many participants
as possible during these first weeks.
Success Rate by Age and Gender
Figure 2. Participant engagement
throughout the seven course weeks
The figure shows that the dropout rate at openHPI averages
to about 16.5% after week 1 and falls to 8% after
week two. If we take the Semantic Web course out of the
equation 7 , the numbers even get as low as 13% after week
one and 7% after week two. After week three, there are
another 3-4% dropouts but for the rest of the courses the
The age structure of openHPI participants shows a clear
peak in the age groups from 20-30 and 30-40 (approx.
27% and 29%). Also the group of learners between 40 and
50 is relatively strong with ~20%. Remarkably 15% of the
users are older than 50, no fewer than 5% are even older
than 60 years.
This information also corresponds with collected data on
the career state and professional experience of the open-
HPI users:
Figure 3. Age and gender of openHPI participants
(absolute numbers)
Figure 4. Completion rates on openHPI
by age and gender
• 56% claim to work as professionals (13% students,
4% academic/research, 10% other, 17% unknown)
• 34% state that they have more than 10 years of
professional experience (15%: 5 to 10 years, 26%: up
to 5 years, 25% unknown).
Regarding gender, there is a clear surplus of male participants,
which is not surprising for courses on ICT topics
with > 50% of German users 8 .
When looking at the success rates (defining success as
completion of a course with a graded certificate) in Fig.
4, there are basically two major observations: there is no
significant difference between the success rates of female
vs. male participants and there is a difference in successful
completion by age groups:
• Participants younger than 20 and between 50
and 60 years complete courses successfully with a
rate of about 20%
• Participants between 20 and 40 as well as over
70 years show a success rate of about 10%
• The age groups between 40 and 50 and between
60 and 70 succeed with about 15%.
An interpretation of these numbers without further data
for correlation (qualitative data such as motivational reasons
for taking courses or quantitative numbers like time
investment grouped by age) would hardly be meaningful.
However, these data will be collected systematically
during future openHPI courses.
7
The course “Semantic Web Technologies” was been offered straight after the completion of the first course “Internetworking mit TCP/IP”, which was lectured
in German. While the course “Internetworking” targeted a wide audience with only basic knowledge in ICT as a prerequisite, the “Semantic Web” course was
designed for at least advanced students with a solid knowledge in logics and theoretical computer science. We learned from the discussion forum that many
participants of “Internetworking” also enrolled for “Semantic Web” and quickly realized that they could not follow the course. This explains the relatively high
dropout rates for that particular course offering.
8
Graduation rates of female students in computer science in Germany are typically between 10 and 20 percent (Schinzel, 2005)
Research Track |105