

Which educational technologies are worth betting on? - yummyfajitas
http://american.com/archive/2012/september/many-to-one-vs-one-to-many-an-opinionated-guide-to-educational-technology

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Turing_Machine
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.

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droithomme
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.

