Harvard and MIT release data on 641,139 MOOC student/course enrollments

This illustrates the difference between a university based program and a commercial enterprise

In the early days of the Internet, the National Science Foundation, which operated the major global backbone, NSFNET, had an acceptable-use policy (AUP) stipulating that the Net was to be used for teaching and research only, not commercial applications. The AUP led to an academic culture that encouraged and rewarded research and sharing.

In that tradition, MIT and Harvard have published data on 16 HarvardX and MITx courses offered during the 2012-13 academic year. The release includes a 20-column, 641,139-row CSV file ready to open with a spreadsheet or other statistical analysis program along with several papers analyzing the data and describing their method of hiding the identity of the students taking the courses.

Download the data and and analyze away -- and don't forget to share your results as a comment on the database download page.