Are High MOOC Failure Rates a Bug Or a Feature? 122
theodp writes "In 'The Online Education Revolution Drifts Off Course,' NPR's Eric Westervelt reports that 2013 might be dubbed the year that online education fell back to earth. Westervelt joins others in citing the higher failure rate of online students as evidence that MOOCs aren't all they're cracked up to be. But viewed another way, the ability to try and fail without dire debt or academic consequences that's afforded by MOOCs could be viewed as a feature and not a bug. Being able to learn at one's own pace is what Dr. Yung Tae Kim has long argued is something STEM education sorely lacks, and MOOCs make it feasible to allow students to try-try-again if at first they don't succeed. By the way, if you couldn't scrape together $65,000 to take CS50 in-person at Harvard this year, today's the first day of look-Ma-no-tuition CS50x (review), kids!"
Re:the rates don't matter as much to me (Score:3, Informative)
I agree, a vast number of failures is to be expected from an online course that requires no monetary input - this is education based PURELY out of self-motivation. Even those who do have the motivation of "I spent money on this therefore I should complete it" still fail due to lack of effort, even those who have little money to throw around. One can only assume that in a forum where you don't pay for the education nor have devoted educators to "hanker" students (even to the a minor extent) is going to be a higher failure rate.
This article http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/mooc-completion-rates-below-7/2003710.article [timeshighe...tion.co.uk] reported, in a study of 29 MOOCs that the worst course studied had a recruitment of 83,000 students with just 0.8% reaching the end - this is still 664 educated people.
Encouragingly, the best course had a completion rate of 19.2% out of 50,000. This gives us 9600 educated people, not a bad number I say.
We cannot forget that MOOCs aren't just used in order to pass them. Someone might be after a particular piece of information or in more extreme cases, educators might encourage students to join these type of courses to help the course that they are studying. This would increased the course numbers but would also increase the failure rate.
It would be interesting to see whether there are trends between failures in courses, how long people stuck with the course and what uses these online course materials are being put to.
Re:Curious (Score:5, Informative)
Try some of the mitx courses. Those can be hard to follow if you have a college engineering degree- they don't dumb it down at all. Udacity really isn't trying to be a college level course- its more a series of not too deep introductions to topics with no rigor behind them.