Desire to learn something is enough to begin with it. Education and learning has been redefined since the internet has made its stand strong and still on earth. A common man has access to the best courses offered from the best universities in the world. Many of the educational institutions have taken a great initiative offering various courses in different domains. Interestingly, they have become so popular that we are at a point where we can study the trend of online learning.
Considering the data of the online courses offered by two of the renowned institutions in the world through EDX online portal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, I have made an analysis which gives an idea of the trend of courses. The purpose of analysing this data is to picture the trend of online courses and their impact since their launch.
Data contains various attributes like the number of subjects offered, the courses offered for each subject, number of students for each course and so on. To understand the data gathered in a better way, different scenarios are taken into consideration. Results are computed and represented graphically. This gives a graphical comparison of about the online courses offered by the MIT and Harvard university.
The scenarios under consideration are as follows,
- EDX forum has been founded in year 2012 by MIT and Harvard University. In total, Harvard university has launched 120+ courses where as MIT has launched approximate 160 so far in 4 different subjects.
As 2012, was the year in which both the universities began with EDX courses so the number of courses launched were less in number. From the year 2013 MIT launched more number of courses than Harvard consecutively. One more thing which we can observe here is that, 2015 was the year in which both the institutes launched maximum number of courses.
2. From 2012, both the universities have been targeting similar subjects, but Harvard showed more interest in launching multiple courses on subject Humanities, History, Design, Religion and Education where as MIT showed more interest towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Interesting thing to see is courses on subject Government, Health and Social Science have almost got equal attention from both the universities so far.
3. Overall Computer Science Subject is less fascinating for Harvard when compared to MIT as it launched only 1 course throughout this period (2012–2016 except of 2013 seen above). MIT has been launching different courses for this subject since the beginning as we can see the growing graph through the years which tells the number of new courses launched by MIT. 2015 is the most prominent year for MIT in which it launched in total 9 different courses in computer science.
4. Now, lets focus on Computer Science Subject as it has always fascinated me. Interestingly, Since the beginning Harvard was successful to attract more students than MIT. I would like to point out here that Harvard launched only 1 course which was Introduction to Computer Science where as MIT launched multiple courses throughout the period.
As we can see, 2015 was the prominent year in which total number of students reached around 300K for Harvard and 250K for MIT. Interesting thing to note here is that, although MIT launched a total of 9 courses in 2015 but still a single course from Harvard managed to gather more audience than MIT. David Malan really rocked in 2015, I would say :)
5. Ratio of Male vs Female is almost equal for Harvard courses (80 / 20 approx) but this is stagnant in case of MIT so far. Most of the courses from MIT also managed to keep the ratio (80 / 20 approx) but would like to point out 3 courses for Mobile Application Designs launched in 2016 managed to shift this ratio a little bit which means females were more interested in Mobile Application Domain than others Domains from MIT.
The core reason, I would guess, this domain is booming in the market right now. Another one it contains less complex concepts from computer science so easy for all.
6. Here, I am using a columns ‘% Bachelor\’s Degree or Higher’ which says how many students are from Bachelor Degree or the Higher one (according to my understanding looking at data). By this knowledge, I got the ‘% Non Degree’ students and performed an analysis. This analysis shows the is the ratio of Non Degree vs Bachelor\’s Degree or Higher for respective years.
I would like to point out one fascinating thing here, Harvard has managed to gather both Non Degree and Higher Degree students but MIT courses mostly taken by Higher Degree students. The reason can be as Introduction to Computer Science by Harvard is a basic computer programming course where courses launched by MIT are mostly skills oriented.
7. For Harvard the minimum median age for a student is 20+ and the maximum is 25+ which says it managed to target both type (Non Degree, Higher Degree) of audience where as for MIT the minimum age is 25+ which says it managed to target mostly Higher Degree students.
At the end, I would like to summarise this blog by following points,
- I have analysed the data of EDX online course forum here which has around of 290 rows and talks primarily about two world famous universities Harvard and MIT. It contains all the information of the courses which had been launched so far through this online portal. I performed an analysis over this data and tried to find out which is most popular university over other in terms of higher audience based on computer science subject.
- I have found many interesting points while analysing such as Harvard launched only 1 basic programming course from 2012 to 2016 in computer science subject where as MIT launched multiple courses throughout this period.
- 2015 was the prominent year in terms of launching courses as well as reached to a milestone of targeting 300k students by Harvard and 250k by MIT.
- Harvard gathered audience from Non Degree as well as Higher Degree as it launched basic programming course in computer science where MIT gathered mostly the Higher Degree students as MIT launched more number of skills’ oriented courses.
