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A lot of it has to do with credentialing. MOOC credentials aren’t worth the time investment.
A lot of it has to do with credentialing. MOOC credentials aren’t worth the time investment.
The completion “rate” does not matter because the denominator is a very noisy signal. It’s a count of enrollments and what does “enrollment” signal in an online course, when it takes two clicks from a tweet.
There are other complexities but completion rate in the “are MOOCs worth offering” question is silly and tired.
What matters is people getting value they otherwise wouldn’t.
There's no certifications with these. You can't get an accounting, law, or medical degree, bachelor/associate certificate, or anything you'd need professional accreditation for.
Maybe the completion rate is similar for people who buy books. I'd end up getting a book thinking it'd be an investment as it would be good as learning a subject. The next day I didn't really want to spend 12 straight hours learning Visual Basic.
Also these aren't like auditing a class and listening in on a real lecture either. Just from the list for UT Austin (a very good school): https://www.edx.org/school/utaustinx
There are university lecturers people listen to all the time though, through the Great Courses / Teaching Company. Those sort of fit the leisure-learner path and don't require logging into some system for it.
These are for MOOCs, not online degree courses, though. There's no certifications with these. You can't get an accounting, law, or medical degree, bachelor/associate certificate, or anything you'd need professional accreditation for. Maybe the completion rate is similar for people who buy books. I'd end up getting a book thinking it'd be an investment as it would be good as learning a subject. The next day I didn't r…
There's an even lower bar to entry: all the MOOCs I've participated in have been free.
https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2...
> While many believe that there is a huge difference between online and on-campus completion rates, [Russell Poulin]’s research suggests the difference is slight. Based on a survey completed by more than 200 North American school officials in 2013, Poulin found that course completion rates averaged three to five percent better for on-campus courses than for online courses.
https://www.edsurge.com/amp/news/2019-06-06-moving-from-5-to...
> Today, 2U reports completion rates of up to 88 percent for their online degree programs. Harvard Business School’s online programs claim similar success, with completion rates of 85 percent.
> At Acumen, where I design online courses, we’ve also been offering selective cohort-based programs for the past year that achieve completion rates of 85 percent. That’s a far cry from five years ago, when only 5 percent of the students were finishing the MOOCs I was designing.
> How have instructional designers collectively moved the needle so dramatically on completion rates? Unsurprisingly, some of the biggest drivers of these improved metrics include making people pay for online programs, increasing the selectivity of courses, and adding program managers and teaching assistants to follow up with learners.
If you want to complete them I really recommend pairing up with a friend. Going at it alone makes it easy to quit. While 3 friends deciding to "drop out" is less likely to happen by an order of magnitude.
Turns out taking a Stanford class (or anything) on the introduction to logic isn't most people's idea of fun.
That’s because overwhelmingly people don’t care about learning, they care about certification. The completion rates for online degrees are vastly higher because people get that piece of paper that marks one as an intelligent, hard working conformist. They have to care enough to apply, and pay for a course. I don’t know how much higher the completion rate is for EdX or Coursera students that pay for verified certifica…