Calculating Online Course Completion Rates

[mj445]

We have a set of three evergreen online courses (evergreen means there is no set start/end date - students can sign up and cancel at any time).

I am trying to figure out the best way to calculate the completion rate for these courses every month, but I'm not sure what data I need or should use for the calculation.

I have the following data (I will use Course 1 as the example):

a. All time number of subscriptions started: 2543
b. Number of subscriptions started since January 1st: 1248
c. Number of subscriptions ended since January 1st: 954
d. July (active) total students: 997
e. Active students who have started Course 1: 680
f. Total students who have completed Course 1 (all time): 125
g. Total student who have completed Course 1 since January 1st: 77
h. Number of students who completed Course 1 in July: 5
i. Total completions for Course 1, 2, and 3 (all time): 232
j. Total completions for Course 1, 2, and 3 since January 1st: 143

For each course, I have tried the following calculations:

f/a = ((all time Course 1 completions)/(all time subscriptions)) = 4.91%
However, students can subscribe to take any of the three courses.

i/a = ((all time completions)/(all time subscriptions)) = 9.12%
This may be the most accurate, but I'm not sure this data will be recent enough to accurately show improvement if we start to implement updates to increase course completion. And some students subscribe more than once to complete the course.

h/e = ((July Course 1 completions)/(Current students who have started Course 1)) = 0.73%
But I'm not sure this is the correct data to use since many students would have started the course before July.

j/b = ((Completions since Jan 1st)/(Subs since Jan 1st)) = 5.62%
However, there will be students who were subscribed before January 1st but completed the course after January 1st.

I am looking for the most accurate calculation for ongoing course completion rate tracking (we will be tracking increases/decreases every month). Please let me know which calculation above you think is most accurate (or if you have any other suggestions for this calculation or require any more data).

Thank you very much for your help.

 

[Dr.Peterson]

You aren't really asking how to calculate the completion rate; it's really about how to define something that can reasonably be called a "completion rate"!

For that, you need to decide what you want it to mean. And you might really need some different data.

I am reminded of what colleges have to do in order to find what percentage of their students graduate. They publish a "4-year graduation rate" and/or "6-year graduation rate", rather than an overall graduation rate, because graduation is open-ended like your courses; I've known students who take a decade to graduate, for one reason or another. So the college picks a nominal target time (4 years for traditional college careers, or 6 years to allow for some delays but not too much) and divide the number who finish within that long of their start, by the number who had started (during some time period at least that long). If your course is theoretically intended to take, say, 3 months, you might count how many complete it within, say, 6 months. You won't be counting everyone who eventually finishes, but if you tried to, you'd never reach a point where you're sure whom to count.

 

[mj445]

Hello Dr.Peterson and thank you very much for your help! It seems you understand my question quite well. This is exactly the issue that I am having.

Unfortunately, I do not have the data for the time frame of completions. I do have the churn rate of subscriptions, but I do not know how many subscriptions are ended before completion (since we use a different platform to track both). I agree that having that data would be a more useful calculation.

So, I guess I am trying to figure out the most useful/accurate calculation based on the data I have. Thank you!