A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
Digital Education For All: Multi-University Study of Increasing Competent Student Admissions at Scale
Authors: Pirttinen Nea, Leinonen Juho, Auvinen Annemari, Lappalainen Vesa, Tynkkynen Katja, Hedberg Henrik, Laakso Mikko-Jussi, Lemström Kjell
Editors: N/A
Conference name: ACM Conference on Learning at Scale
Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Publication year: 2022
Book title : L@S '22: Ninth (2022) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
Journal name in source: L@S 2022 - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
First page : 72
Last page: 81
ISBN: 978-1-4503-9158-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491140.3528266
Web address : https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491140.3528266
An indubitable way to put learning at scale in practice is to implement Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. When a wide-enough portfolio of them is available, new applications arise. For instance, university admissions in Finland, where this study was conducted, have traditionally been based on students' grades in high school studies, an entrance examination, or a combination of both. A minority of students have been accepted through an open university admission path where students can get a study right if they complete enough university course credits with a high enough grade in a given time frame. In this work, we report results from a multi-university project in which the open university admission path has been expanded. All the universities in the Digital Education For All (DEFA) project remarkably expanded their portfolio of MOOCs that were offered both openly and for free, and the new admission path was simultaneously actively marketed and modified. In our analysis, we focus on examining whether the project increased computer science enrolments in the participating universities and how students accepted through the project perform in their studies compared to their peers accepted through other, traditional intake paths.