Analysis of the Applicability of General Scaling Laws on Course Size, Completion Rates, and Forum Activity in MOOCs

Abstract

In 2017, Geoffrey West published his book "Scale"in which he examined universal laws of scale in different contexts. Inspired by his keynote in 2021's Learning@Scale conference, we investigated the applicability of these laws in the context of Massive Open Online Courses and learners' behavior. We tested these laws on different learning platforms from academic, enterprise and social, and research contexts. In this paper, we examine course characteristics, such as course size, the completion rate, and the forum activity. We observed that the number of issued certificates scales almost identically on all examined platforms, while forum participation scales slightly different on each of the platforms. In the future, we will perform a deeper analysis on the forum behavior that exceeds a mere quantitative analysis.