Everyone points at the low completion rate for MOOCs, but generally ignore several salient facts:
1) The students who don't finish incur no tuition costs, don't have to worry about student loan debt, take no hit on their transcripts (or any other sort of "permanent record") and likely don't even lose much of their time (while I haven't seen any hard numbers, I'd bet that most of the "dropouts" sign up, do one or two lessons, and then decide that the course isn't for them). So what if most of them don't finish? They haven't lost anything.
2) He claims that "90% don't benefit". He knows this how, exactly? You can benefit from a book or a course without finishing it.
3) Even with the low completion rate, the raw numbers mean that many more people have finished than have finished in a F2F course. I think I read that more students completed the first iteration of the MIT circuits course than have completed the similar face-to-face course in all the years that it has been offered.. That's impressive.
It's amazing how consistently disparaging professional old school educators are in their daily blog attacks on on line classes. Nearly every article proclaims Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, etc "failures", in direct contradiction to obvious facts that vastly more people are successfully mastering the material in these classes than are doing so in person at the schools of the detractors.
1) The students who don't finish incur no tuition costs, don't have to worry about student loan debt, take no hit on their transcripts (or any other sort of "permanent record") and likely don't even lose much of their time (while I haven't seen any hard numbers, I'd bet that most of the "dropouts" sign up, do one or two lessons, and then decide that the course isn't for them). So what if most of them don't finish? They haven't lost anything.
2) He claims that "90% don't benefit". He knows this how, exactly? You can benefit from a book or a course without finishing it.
3) Even with the low completion rate, the raw numbers mean that many more people have finished than have finished in a F2F course. I think I read that more students completed the first iteration of the MIT circuits course than have completed the similar face-to-face course in all the years that it has been offered.. That's impressive.