Open Scale Courses: Exploring Access and Opportunity for Less-Educated Learners

An important goal of the MOOC movement was to democratize education. We explore an alternative to the traditional MOOC an “open scale” program specifically designed to increase access and opportunity for those who need a pathway into higher education. We examine the effects of education level (those with a BA or higher vs. lower attainment) and country of residence (US vs. Non-US) on course completion and college credit-earning, and introduce a “committed learner” category to aid in assessing open scale courses. Lower education level learners are represented at a higher rate and perform better than would be predicted by data from standard MOOCs, suggesting that the approach could help achieve some of the loftier goals of open scale education.