

Rethinking Low Completion Rates in MOOCs - ilamont
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/rethinking-low-completion-rates-in-moocs/55211?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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ryanobjc
Completion rates is a pretty poor measure of what I think we really care about
the most: educational uptake and learning.

On a side note, I'm a little disappointed in ed-tech. I was hoping for a
revolution in pedagogical approaches. But it seems we are still working on it!
Bring on the brain-plug learning a la Neuromancer, et al.

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Devthrowaway80
Why is a low completion rate causing concern? I never completed the machine
learning course by Andrew Ng - my schedule didn't always wind up aligning with
the times allotted for homework, and to be honest, there was some laziness
mixed in there later on as well. I still got a lot out of the course - I've
unexpectedly found myself having to do a lot of machine learning work at my
new job, and the stuff I was exposed to in the Coursera course has helped to
orient me.

A couple comments on that page stood out for me - one, that even with a low
completion rate, more people completed a single online electronics course at
MITx than have ever done so in person in the entire history of MIT. Second,
the comment likening MOOCs to books - even if I don't finish a book, I still
get value from reading it.

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krick
It's kinda funny somebody takes this numbers so seriously. My completion rate
must be something about zero, but it would be nonsense to say _I 'm not
learning_. I hardly ever follow the course "in the real time", which means
even if I do all my homework it almost never is full-score (most of the time
even doesn't count as completed at all: for example on "archived" courses on
edx) and by no means I do _all my homework_. In fact, right now I can remember
at least 2 courses which are extremely hight in my personal "amount of
practical knowledge gained from it" toplist, for which I completed exactly
zero homeworks and never even watched video on the coursera, because it was
easier for me to get it from torrents. For courses with programming it often
is downloading assignments, but never submitting them. Why? For various
reasons. Sometimes I want to try to do something in other language than
suggested one. Sometimes I can think of something more interesting or
practical or challenging to do, based on topic I just learned. And if it is
the case it actually means I just gained much _more_ from the material than if
the best I could do would be just completing what is expected from me.
Sometimes, of course, it's the opposite: the material is to easy or just silly
for I would care completing assignments or even watching all the videos. And,
yes, sometimes (rarely, though) the homework seems to be too hard and time
consuming than I'm ready to be doing. Sometimes all I do on the course is
using forums, sometimes I never even open the forums once. Sometimes all I get
from the course is accidentally getting myself interested in some another
topic, very slightly related to the course itself, and I'll be investigating
on this topic reading various stuff for a very long time after that. In short,
I never even tried to be "completing courses" on MOOC, I just tried to learn
what I'm interested in _maybe_ using the course material, maybe not, doing
things on my own pace, deciding what I should spend time on by myself, and my
observable online behavior hardly tells anything about how much I actually
invested in learning something.

So this attitude of "You see these low completion rates?! Not like in _real_
universities at all!" is just silly. Because, yeah, right, MOOC aren't like
"real" (old-fashion) universities: it's entirely different and ultimately much
better thing. It's about _learning_ , not about _completing courses_ , even if
creators of these courses don't think so. Test scores and graduating rates are
notoriously bad measure even for "real life" universities, and thousand times
more so for MOOC.

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dragonwriter
I think the low completion rates of MOOCs are, while not necessarily a _good_
thing, also not a bad thing, and basically _symptomatic_ of a good thing. In
terms of committed costs, MOOCs for the most part are more like textbooks than
traditional college classes, even on an a-la-carte menu as one might have
available through a community college or extension program. The cash cost is
fairly low, the effort expended in enrolling is low, and the time/effort cost
is just the time and effort expended directly in online course activities, not
driving to a fixed class location at a fixed time that forces giving up other
activities with time conflicts (you still have to give up other activities,
but you are more flexible as to which ones), etc.

So they are cheap to experiment with and don't have a lot of sunk costs that
people feel they need to justify that stops people from abandoning them if
once they get in they expectations aren't met, circumstances change, etc.

So there's a lot lower risk, and people can try a _lot_ more to find what they
are looking for. I've finished maybe a third to a half of the MOOCs I've
enrolled in, and I certainly wouldn't do that with college classes -- but that
doesn't mean that I'm less well served with MOOCs -- the cost of college
classes is high enough that I wouldn't _take_ most of the MOOCs I've
_completed_ \-- much less all those I've taken and often still gotten
something out of without completing -- as traditional classes, because the
risk of something with a higher priority in my life changing so I couldn't
complete them, combined with the cost that goes into a traditional college
class, would be too high.

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jibly
I just recently launched a startup trying to take on this challenge of low
completion rates in MOOCs: www.madrassa.co (you can read more in the about
section concerning this insane dropout rate of MOOCs)

