For Online Courses, Questions Over How Success is Measured (2014)

I am always amazed when people make comments like this:

"The results of the University of Texas at Austin’s first full-semester foray into massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are in."

"Professor Michael Webber’s “Energy 101,” which had an enrollment that peaked at around 44,000 students, had 5,000 receive a certificate of completion — about 13 percent of the roughly 38,000 students who ultimately participated."

So let's unpack this a bit. Professor Webber created a class called "Energy 101" and processed 5,000 students through it to completion. Your typical 100 level undergraduate class might have anywhere from 50 to 200 students in it.

UT Austin this year had 8690 freshman total.

So assuming the largest possible class of 200, this professor in one semester taught the equivalent of 25 semesters of 200 student classes, in one semester.

Why should we care that 32,000 people signed up and then said "Woah, really don't have the time to commit to this right now?"

It is one thing to move to a campus dorm and start studying some topic. It is quite another to click a few links on a web page and say, "Yeah, that could be an interesting class."

This might be outdated on some platforms, but the last time I had time to indulge in some online courses, you had to enrol in the course just to see the syllabus.

My completion rate was not stellar.

From having taught a MooC, I can share some light on this. Most people who sign up and drop it do so to access the course ware. Once they have downloaded this, they disappear or fade away.

Trump graduated University, so how are you defining self educated?

Zuckerberg received an honorary degree, which suggests the University approved of what he learnt.

If you're pointing at education as the cause of the problem for these 2, structured education bears at least some of the blame because it should have been teaching the tools for further learning.

Until Visa officials around the World wake up and smell the coffee that Degrees shouldn't matter for immigration - I will care about and be anxious about my lack of a Degree. Until MOOCs don't confer a degree - it's going to be very hard to convince me to spend time getting a Certificate from it (as opposed to watching the most interesting and important bits and skipping the rest, in the "YouTube University" style).