Digital Education for All: Multi-University Study of Increasing Competent Student Admissions at Scale

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 them. 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 re-
sults from a multi-university project in which the open university
admission path has been expanded. All the universities in the Dig-
ital 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.