
Higher education: Creative destruction - tomaskazemekas
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21605906-cost-crisis-changing-labour-markets-and-new-technology-will-turn-old-institution-its?fsrc=nlw|hig|27-06-2014|5356be57899249e1cca20c83|
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webhat
Interesting article, even though many of the 'facts' about MOOCs are largely
based conjecture. There is little hard evidence that "MOOCs [...] have so far
failed to live up to their promise. _Largely because there is no formal system
of accreditation_ , drop-out rates have been high."

From the research I did it comparing MOOCs to other online education offerings
this is merely one of the contributing factors. IMHO the primary factor to the
failure of MOOCs is that they are massive. Recent research, highlighted in the
NYT, showed that the introduction style courses - the ones with 300-400
students - suffer from the same or similar problems. Once they took some of
the poorest performers out of the lecture halls and put them in classes of ~30
they outperformed the students in the large classes.

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tomaskazemekas
One way of dealing with the teaching assistance shortage during the course is
community discussion forums. The best implementation of it I found are on
Udacity and Coursera. Another excellent teaching aid is Community Teaching
Assistants on some of the Coursera courses, e. g. Machine Learning by Andrew
Ng.

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webhat
In one of the highest followed and most completed course, which happens to be
the first Machine Learning by Andrew Ng, the level of completion was a meager
12.5%. And in that Ng's course is an outlier as no other courses with similar
sizes, with the exception of AI, have come anywhere close to that level of
completion. The numbers actually show the opposite, a large course has a lower
percentage of completion.

IMHO if course community were a large factor this high trafficked course with
a high level of community discussion would most likely have exceeded this. As
you say later ML courses have had much community discussion, yet they have had
lower completion rates.

At the moment there is no substitute for real interaction with the docent or
professor.

