Lessons learned from two years of K-MOOC experience

In October 2015, Korea launched its first massive open online course (MOOC) program entitled K-MOOC. This study analyzes the K-MOOC learner data provided by the National Lifelong Learning Agency. The data include the 272 courses implemented between 26 October 2015, and 31 August 2017 and the participants who took the said courses. The number of participants in the K-MOOC courses in the same period stands at 289,163. The average completion rate of K-MOOC was 9.3%. It is not far below the average completion rate of MOOCs in general, which is known to be 10% or lower. A comparison between Korea's K-MOOC and the United States' edX, which consists of similar courses to the former, shows that the most visible difference between the two lies in the average number of participants per course. An average K-MOOC course is taken by 1,063.1 participants, whereas an average edX course serves 15,341.5 participants. Moreover, there were 91% of participants who accessed the K-MOOC courses from their host country, whereas it was 29% for edX.