Were you one of the thousands of MIT OpenCourseWare users who responded to our user survey this spring? If so, please accept our heartfelt thanks! Your input is helping us learn who our users are and how our open educational resources can better assist you in your individual learning.

A little background: In a previous blog post, we announced a new effort to learn more about our users and their needs and wishes. This spring we enlisted the help of Irina Chen, a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, to create a new user survey, our first since 2015. Over a survey period of about seven weeks between late April and early June, we collected responses from some 5,240 users of our website and YouTube channel—a 13% improvement over the previous survey.

Since the respondents were self-selected rather than having been chosen at random, the results can’t be interpreted as forming a statistically representative sample of our user base. They do, however, provide enough data to enable us to form some reasonably secure conclusions:

  • The overwhelming majority of our users are male, but the percentage of our users who identify themselves as female is creeping upward—from 17% in the 2015 survey to 19% in this year’s survey.
  • This year, for the first time, the survey offered participants a third option, for those who prefer not to identify as either male or female. Some 3% of our users selected this option.
  • As of 2015, just about half of our survey respondents were located in the United States (27%) or India (22%). These percentages remain nearly unchanged in 2025, with 27% of respondents hailing from the United States and 23% from India.
  • However, though those two countries account for half of our reported user base, the other half is quite diverse geographically; also featuring among the top ten places of residence reported in the survey are countries in North America (Canada and Mexico), South America (Brazil), Africa (Egypt), Asia (China and Bangladesh), and Europe (Germany and the UK).
  • Considering that MIT OpenCourseWare concentrates on university-level educational materials, it’s somewhat surprising that only slightly over half (52%) of the survey respondents are between 18 and 34 years old. Precocious learners under the age of 18 make up almost 12% of our user base, users between 35 and 64 years old account for nearly 27%, and nearly 9% are 65 years old or older. (In 2015 this last figure was just 3.3%!)

A pie chart showing the distribution of ages of users of MIT OpenCourseWare, with colored sectors labeled "Under 18 - 11.9%," "18-24 years old - 34.4%," "25-34 years old - 17.8%," "35-44 years old - 10.6%," "45-54 years old - 9.3%," "55-64 years old - 7.0%," and "65+ years old - 8.9%"

So we do have some useful information about our users’ gender, where in the world they live, and their ages. But how do they tend to use our site, and what do they want from MIT OpenCourseWare? Stay tuned for details in a followup post.