One year with MOOCs, research findings from the first 17 edX classes

Courtesy of: MOOCs.com

Professors from MIT and Harvard report on their first year in MOOCs and the edX project: 

MITx working papers
HarvardX Working Papers

• There were 841,687 registrations from 597,692 unique users
• Only 5 percent earned a certificate of completion.
• One-third of users never viewed any course materials.
• More than half of those who completed at least half of the course went on to earn a certificate of completion

See also:
Education Week article from one of the authors, 

The First Year of edX: Research Findings to Inform Online Learning