Research & Pedagogy

Working with our xConsortium of university partners, edX is empowering research on pedagogy or learning about learning.

The online environment provides a powerful platform to conduct experiments, exploring how students learn and how faculty can best teach using a variety of novel tools and techniques.

Fundamental questions include:

• What motivates students to learn and persist?
• What helps students retain knowledge?
• What are the best ways to teach complex ideas?
• How can we assess what students have learned?
• What is best taught in person vs. online?

By carefully assessing course data, from mouse clicks to time spent on tasks, to evaluating how students respond to various assessments, researchers hope to shed light on how learners access information and master materials, with the ultimate aim of improving course outcomes.

We are not only expanding access to knowledge, but developing best practices to enhance the student experience and improve teaching and learning both on campus and online.

Below you will find a sampling of research papers authored by our xConsortium partners:

• Transforming Advanced Placement High School Classrooms Through Teacher-Led MOOC Models

• A Preliminary Assessment of an MIT Campus Experiment with an edX Online Course: The Pilot of 6.S064 Circuits and Electronics

• HarvardX and MITx: Four Years of Open Online Courses -- Fall 2012 - Summer 2016

• Can Physics Be Taught Like Soccer?

• Leveraging MOOCs for Credit-Granting Institutions: Results from a Community College Pilot Study.

• HarvardX and MITx: Two Years of Open Online Courses Fall 2012-Summer 2014

• Enrollment in MITx MOOCs: Are We Educating Educators?

• Staggered Versus All-At-Once Content Release in Massive Open Online Courses: Evaluating a Natural Experiment

• Computer-Assisted Reading and Discovery for Student Generated Text in Massive Open Online Courses

• Learning in an Introductory Physics MOOC: All Cohorts Learn Equally, Including an On-Campus Class

• The Transformative Potential of Blended Learning Using MIT edX’s 6.002x Online MOOC Content Combined with Student Team-Based Learning in Class

• Privacy, Anonymity, and Big Data in the Social Sciences

• Developing and Implementing Effective Instructional Stratgems in STEM

• Predicting Student Retention in Massive Open Online Courses using Hidden Markov Models

• MITx Working Papers

• Bringing student backgrounds online: MOOC user demographics, site usage, and online learning

• Studying Learning in the Worldwide Classroom: Research into edX’s First MOOC

• An Integrated Framework for the Grading of Freeform Responses

• Participation And performance In 8.02x Electricity And Magnetism: The First Physics MOOC From MITx

• Teaching Electronic Circuits Online: Lessons from MITx’s 6.002x on edX

• A New Approach to Developing Interactive Software Modules through Graduate Education

• Changing “Course”: Reconceptualizing Educational Variables for Massive Open Online Courses

• Development of a Framework to Classify MOOC Discussion Forum Posts: Methodology and Challenges

• MOOCdb: Developing Data Standards for MOOC Datascience

• Adapting Bayesian Knowledge Tracing to a Massive Open Online Course in edX