Like the audience of a Harvard course on the first day of the semester, the people registered for edX fall into three categories: shoppers, auditors, and enrollers.

On the edX platform, those categories translate into those who sign up out of curiosity, those who watch and read the virtual material without turning in assignments, and those who successfully see the class through to the end.

The program currently offers free certificates of mastery to users who master a course at a level that would equate to a passing grade. Each certificate bears the name of the institution that created the course. For some, having that distinction delivered to their inbox is sufficient motivation to take an edX course.

Amol Bhave, a 17-year-old from Jabalpur, says the promise of a certificate was central to his decision to enroll in Agarwal’s course, MITx 6.002x: “Circuits and Electronics.”

“It’s a thing to be proud of to have a certificate with the MIT name on it, especially here in India,” Bhave said.

After Bhave earned a 97 percent grade on the course’s final exam, he created his own online course that integrated videos, a grading mechanism, and a syllabus in a style inspired by the edX platform. An impressed Agarwal wrote a recommendation letter for Bhave to MIT, which ultimately helped his admission to the prestigious school.

“Without edX, I couldn’t have even dreamt of colleges,” Bhave said. “It changed my life, and edX is going to change the world.”

At the other extreme is Doty, a 33-year-old who works at a Virginia-based Cheesecake Factory, who said she was motivated to take CS50x: “Introduction to Computer Science I” by the promise of “mental stimulation” but that she had no intention of completing it.

“I also have dipped my toes in others just to take a look, consciously knowing it wouldn’t fit my schedule, but wanting to keep it in mind for the future,” Doty said.

Diana M. B. Chen ’16, a Harvard freshman, watched edX lecture videos late into the night in her Weld dorm room in the hopes of exploring subjects she could not pursue in the classroom due to her commitments as a coxswain for the Harvard Men’s Varsity rowing team.

Yet edX disappointed Chen, who said she felt many of her virtual classmates ignored the educational benefits of courses in their fixation on earning a certificate. She described her MOOC experience as “not even a tenth of what it’s like to go to Harvard.”

COMPLETION VALUE

Low rates of completion suggest that while individuals register for edX for different reasons, many students do not see an explicit value in the certificate itself.

Computer science lecturer David J. Malan ’99 tracked the number of students who engaged with his virtual course, CS50x, from start to finish. Out of the 150,349 students who registered for CS50x, 10,905 submitted the first problem set. Of that group, 3381 individuals said they hoped to get a certificate out of the course, and only 1388 actually received one.

According to data collected by MITx with funds from the National Science Foundation, that same trajectory occurred in Agarwal’s course 6.002x, for which 154,763 people registered, 26,349 turned in the first problem set, 9,318 students passed the midterm, and 7,157 ended up certified.