by Karis Hustad, Chicago Inno
Northwestern Kellogg professor Gad Allon has been quietly experimenting with ways to not only get students to sign up for these courses, but actually finish them. In addition to teaching operations courses at Kellogg, he teaches “Scaling Operations: Linking Strategy and Execution,” a MOOC through Coursera. It is a free course, but students can pay to get a certificate of accomplishment. Recently he and two other Kellogg researchers, Jan Van Mieghem and Dennis J. Zhang, tested out their hypothesis that emailed “nudges” could push students to talk with classmates and check out a discussion board. That, in turn, could help students stay engaged, and therefore be more likely to complete a course. This course had about 24,000 students and about 4,200 of them submitted at least one of the weekly quizzes.
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