For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
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Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#2Not surprising at all. I often follow the first few weeks of a MOOC but after a bit I am satisfied and don't feel the need to push through all 13-17 weeks of material. Isn't that a success? I certainly learned a lot along the way all the same! Much more about a topic than I would reading the wikipedia page or an introductory blog post, because MOOCs (being regular college classes) take a lot of pains to lay out the course material in a logical and structured format, which is itself alone already much more valuable than a single person's hodgepodge thoughts.
Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#3Not surprising at all. I often follow the first few weeks of a MOOC but after a bit I am satisfied and don't feel the need to push through all 13-17 weeks of material. Isn't that a success? I certainly learned a lot along the way all the same! Much more about a topic than I would reading the wikipedia page or an introductory blog post, because MOOCs (being regular college classes) take a lot of pains to lay out the c…
Came here to say this. It's the same with text-like books. There's 100 pages of what you bought the book for, and 400 pages of filler at the end in an attempt to add more value.
Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#42014, but I find it interesting the title focuses on the completion percentage. Instead, it seems it could have equally been that graduation at the online class was more than 10 times that of his average semester (also from the article). Negativity sells?
Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#5A lot of it has to do with credentialing. MOOC credentials aren’t worth the time investment.
Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#6It's interesting how content discovery has remained ad-hoc despite the arrival of ed-tech platforms like Coursera or EdX. People still prefer to ask for best books, courses, podcasts, cheatsheets on Slack/Discord/Twitter etc.
I think this has to do with the conflict of interest. Any platform that creates its own educational content, necessarily becomes bad at content _curation_. For ex, 3Blue1Brown has amazing series on linear algebra and calculus but we don't find Coursera pointing to it.
Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#7I dropped one on automata after an exercise in the first exam required making use of an undisclosed algorithm that wasn't central to the topic and not covered in any of the required reading. When asking the lecturer about it, he directed me to chapters n through n+5 in some other book. I guess I didn't want it enough.
Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#8This is great news.
I remember a time when/where this kind of knowledge was hard to find and devoured whenever it was made available to you.
Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#9It's interesting how content discovery has remained ad-hoc despite the arrival of ed-tech platforms like Coursera or EdX. People still prefer to ask for best books, courses, podcasts, cheatsheets on Slack/Discord/Twitter etc. I think this has to do with the conflict of interest. Any platform that creates its own educational content, necessarily becomes bad at content _curation_. For ex, 3Blue1Brown has amazing series…
3Blue1Brown made videos for Khan Academy for a while but ultimately decided to take his career in a different direction. He talks about it on the first episode[1] of the Numberphile podcast, which if you are a fan of 3Blue1Brown I'd highly reccomend giving it a listen.
Re: For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)
#10The fact these classes dont allow one to preview the first few courses before registering has to influence these stats.
I’ve done a number of them over the last couple of years and the fact that I can’t preview has caused me to abandon so many of them. If I don’t like my professor, the way the course is organized, or whatever, I’ll abandon the course and go find some other source for the same information which does a better job resonating with me.
And I know I’m not alone in doing this, off the top of my head, I know at least 3 workmates and at least a number of friends who do the same thing.
The completion rate would have to shoot up much higher were they to allow people to know what theyre getting into ahead of time. And strangely, these companies have a much better ability to do this than traditional schools.