Al Filreis's Modern and Contemporary American Poetry is one of the most successful MOOCs. In particular, participants' involvement is sustained over time to an unusual extent — here's the daily volume of forum posts and comments for the first two months of ModPo2, which is currently underway:
Overall forum participation is high, but the distribution of thread lengths is highly skewed: some posts get 60-70 comments, while others get much smaller numbers:
About 75% get none at all (not shown on the graph above). Here's the empirical probability of continuing a discussion thread as a function of the thread length (where length=1 is the original post with no comments yet):
In other words, the longer a thread is (up to length 20 or so, anyhow), the more likely it is to be continued. Although we haven't tried yet, it seems likely that a "rich get richer" process of an appropriate sort can approximate this pattern fairly well. A small amount of poking around in the literature has left me uncertain whether this is a more-or-less universal feature of discussion forums.
A more interesting question is the nature of the substantive factors that contribute to continuing or stopping at any given stage.
[Joint work with Ritika Khandeparkar]
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