Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

Thankfully the article is much better than its title. Low retention is not a problem per se - since there's no cost to signing up for (and subsequently dropping) these online courses, it's to be expected that retention won't be great. However, I agree that retention could probably be improved among the marginal subscribers by using some of the techniques covered in the post.

The way that Udacity does it is perfect for me -- work through at your own pace. Coursera has a couple of self-paced classes, I believe, and I wish that more of the courses had that option.

I think the majority of MOOC course developers want to run their online courses as closely to their university versions as possible, since that's what they're used to working with. It also provides a handy way for them to go off-duty, in a sense, if the course has a finite end date. Using their current pacing structure (which is incredibly difficult, as the OP points out, for people that aren't full-time students) allows the teachers to do something other than devote themselves solely to the course, assuming they don't want to just post an archive and leave it alone -- which would meet a lot of people's needs, but misses the whole teacher-student interaction, which is pretty much missing from MOOCs anyway. If they want to provide an environment that's like a classroom, with students interacting with the instructors and with each other, you kind of need everybody at the same pace. It would be nice for us if they could slow that pace down, but that would probably increase the workload for the instructors.

We're still early in this game. I'm glad that so many professors have been willing to invest the time into developing the courses, and I understand why they are currently set up to be conveniently structured for them. I think we'll start to see some improvements if/when the money appears in the MOOC game. Once it's no longer basically charity work for the instructors, there will probably be more efforts to work around student schedules.

My problem was mainly the availability of the materials. Codecademy and duolingo give you access to as much as you require from the start and you can go through as quickly as you like. The university driven sites limit access to so much per week (though I'm not sure how courses will operate the second time) and demand you stick to their schedule, though granted this may be due to their need to peer-review the more demanding assignments.

Unfortunately my free time isn't available in nice predetermined six-week chunks, but even if I am able to catch up three weeks or more in a weekend the courses gave a very negative vibe about continuing to progress as soon as you miss a single one of their deadlines (i.e.- "you missed our deadline for this multiple-choice computer marked test, so your effort no longer counts"). I've 'failed' several coursera sessions in the fourth or fifth week for that reason.

Timetabling seems a very traditional educational view, and it contrasted sharply with codecademy and sites like duolingo where I spent Jan and Feb learning the basics of new languages - computer and human. I finished the courses I took because I did them at my own pace.

One of the things to that I found confusing with the coursera classes was that each one seems to have its own set of rules for dealing with homework assignments, late homework, and partial credit. At one point I was signed up for two classes at the same time and I assumed they had the same policy for when homework was due. It wasn't a big deal but there were several times I would have a free hour or so and it was a task to figure out the best way to use that time. I think it is a positive thing that the courses are trying out a lot of different approaches to see what works best but this reminded me of the parts of academia that I didn't really care for.

You can do the same with a video. You pause it, get on a relevant IRC channel or internet forum and ask "what does she mean by X at 23:51?" Or you Google the term or process you were confused about and find someone else's explanation (I have personally done this loads of times). Or you turn to the person you're watching it with and ask. Or you call up your study group on skype. Do those two latter things usually happen now? No, but they easily, easily could if this type of learning became mainstream.

Is having a professor there that you can ask immediately in the moment (and interrupt the lecture for the other students who understood the material) worth $1000 per credit hour?