One key question is how participation in a professionally oriented advanced MOOC such as BDEMOOC influences longer‐term student participation in careers involving EDM. A survey was given to students at the end of the first iteration of BDEMOOC. At the end of the course, more than 80% of respondents (among a limited set of 536 respondents, not all of whom completed the course) plan to use the skills taught in this MOOC in their career (Wang, Paquette, & Baker, 2015).Going forward from self‐reported intent to use the skills to actual community participation, we have found that 35 students who registered for the MOOC joined the International Educational Data Mining Society in the first several months after the course started. Preliminary analyses indicated that these 35 students dispropor-tionately completed the course; 20% of students who joined the society completed the course. By comparison, only 1.3% of the students who did not join the society completed the course (χ2 (1)=97.438, p<0.001) (Wang, Paquette, & Baker, 2015). As such, course completion is a strong sign of the type of interest that leads students to join the associated scientific community.Although 35 is a small number in comparison to the total enrollment, it only reflects one small aspect of community participation. Another indicator of community participation comes from Danielle McNamara’s keynote address at the International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge in 2015. During her keynote, she asked members of the audience who had enrolled in BDEMOOC’s first iteration, and around 40% of the people in the room raised their hands. Further data on learner par-ticipation in the EDM and LAK scientific communities is also in the process of being collected in order to better understand what role (if any) this MOOC played in the role of the development of the field. If this project is successful, it may contribute to our understanding of what it means for a MOOC to succeed and how the effective-ness of a MOOC can be assessed more comprehensively.