MIT professor Justin Reich and several colleagues just completed one of the largest-ever research studies exploring teaching techniques in online higher education, involving nearly 250,000 students from nearly every nation on the planet.

The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, was meant to show that small behavioral interventions, like asking students in a pre-course survey to describe when and how they planned to fit the required course work into their lives, would significantly improve completion rates in large online classes.