San Jose State Suspends Collaboration With Udacity

New submitter ulatekh writes "San Jose State University is suspending a highly touted collaboration with online provider Udacity to offer low-cost, for-credit online courses after finding that more than half of the students failed to pass the classes. 'Preliminary results from a spring pilot project found student pass rates of 20% to 44% in remedial math, college-level algebra and elementary statistics courses. In a somewhat more promising outcome, 83% of students completed the classes.'"

Why is that rate bad?

[SuperKendall]

In any online effort, you are going to get a ton of people who sign up, some that follow along the first few weeks, and then a significant dropoff as people move on to other things.

You cannot apply in-person success rates to online efforts.

Perhaps what they need to do is organize the classes around micro-classes no longer than two weeks. That way they wouldn't get people just dropping off the grid and actually finishing classes... you could string together a series of such classes to make a whole course. It would also let people jump in at the level they felt comfortable at and not bored.

Re:Microsoft Learning

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah, your user numbers have all the same numbers.

Not Udacit, but Coursera...

[IANAAC]

I don't have any experience with Udacity, but I do have an experience with Coursera that caused me, the student, to shy away from their courses.

I completed a course through Coursera from the University of Toronto. It was a good course, and I enjoyed it. Learned a lot from the course. In the final week of the course (it wasn't a free-for-all - I had to register for the course and complete it, with tests every week, during and eight week period set but the U of Toronoto), there was an exam that would make up 50 percent of my total grade. Coursera completely fell over that final week, and I wasn't able to gain access to the test until two days after the course deadline. So there went an otherwise good grade. They wouldn't allow any tests to be taken after the deadline, regardless of technical issues.

I had spent a total of around 40-45 hours with the course, 20 of those hours were video lectures that needed to be watched, the rest was study time. Even though all I would get from the course was a certificate of completion, I felt cheated and like I'd wasted a lot of my time for what was otherwise a good course.

Would I take another course? Maybe, but I know that if I were studying for transferable college credit, I would have been seriously pissed.

I wonder how much of the non-pass rate was due to issues other than actual class material in Udacity's case.

Re:Is that not a good thing?

[Mr. Freeman]

Not in this case. We're talking about remedial mathematics and elementary statistics here. These are courses that every adult in this entire country should have a firm grasp of. It's absolutely ridiculous that more than 5% of these students are failing these courses.

This means that we have adults, people in charge of running their own lives, who don't fully comprehend how fractions or percentages work. There are people who are eligible to obtain loans and credit that can't calculate compound interest. It's a fucking miracle that we've managed to come this far while being this ignorant.

Re:Microsoft Learning

[Anonymous Coward]

The comment ID numbers are transpositions of each other, too. WTF?

Not even a little surprising to me.

[drdanny_orig]

40 years ago or so, I taught those same remedial classes to freshmen students at a large Midwestern land-grant 4-year university. The only reason my pass rate was higher than 44% was because I felt sorry for the kids. I was then, and am now still considered a good instructor. Most of those students had no business being in college in the first place, and I could tell that few if any would finish regardless of how I graded them. Remember, these are students who were unable to pass the basic requirements coming out of high school. Not representative of the population as a whole. I suspect the "online-edness" of these classes has very little to do with it.