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Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

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Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#31

Post by khet »

michaelt wrote: post #17
tkahn6 wrote: post #3

I usually sign up for a bunch of classes just so I can access the material at a later point when I have time or when I'm interested. I'm pretty sure that in most cases Coursera locks you out of old material unless you were enrolled. I don't follow along with the class. Synchronous learning, IMO, is an anachronism. We have video recording technology, practically infinite bandwidth, and near speed of light communicatio…

I usually sign up for a bunch of classes just so I can access the material at a later point when I have time or when I'm interested. How many of those classes have you done the work for? Personally I find the synchronous model helps me complete the course, as it removes the temptation to put things off.

That may be but I personally find it extremely difficult to juggle my everyday working life with an online class. I would much rather download and watch a video lecture on the way to work.

Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#33

Post by mikevm »

pamelafox wrote: post #13

(Coursera engineer here) It's great to see thoughtful critiques like this. Thankfully, we have a data analytics team now (3 out of our 17 engineers), and they are studying our retention statistics and the factors that affect it. They're also running A/B experiments to see what increases it and getting some interesting results. We do see some big advantages of the timed model for learning, particularly in classes with…

Nice to see you here!

I do hope that you will open up most (if not all) of your courses for self-study mode. There are a few courses I really wanted to take, but due to the lack of time I really couldn't commit myself at the time they opened (I wanted to do them in the summer instead!).

I also think this guy makes valid points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5469909

Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#34

Post by walrus »

I'm more likely to finish a few chapters of a textbook than a series of videos:

1. Videos are usually too long. There isn't a natural break to stop and try things out. (Udacity does a good job with this one.)

2. Information density isn't constant. With text, this isn't an issue: I naturally adjust my reading speed if I hit a sparse or dense area. With video, I have to either live with it or constantly re-adjust the video speed.

Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#35

Post by nbouscal »

I don't see how something can be a "dirty secret" when everyone already knows about it. This is not news, and I think the author is well aware of that and just wanted an eye-grabbing headline.

As for courses being too fast: they're college courses. That's a core part of their value proposition. If they were slower, or did not follow a rigid schedule at all (like the "better" examples presented in the article), they would be a fundamentally different product. The author simply doesn't understand the concept behind MOOCs, and probably isn't their intended audience. He would be better served watching lectures on Youtube (I don't mean that sarcastically, there are fantastic courses available there).

Synchronous learning is not, as another poster claims, an anachronism. It simply isn't necessary or valuable for everyone. For some, myself included, it is a significant benefit. That is the market that Coursera and edX are targeting, and one shouldn't criticize a company simply because one isn't a member of their target market.

Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#36

Post by spikels »

tkahn6 wrote: post #3

I usually sign up for a bunch of classes just so I can access the material at a later point when I have time or when I'm interested. I'm pretty sure that in most cases Coursera locks you out of old material unless you were enrolled. I don't follow along with the class. Synchronous learning, IMO, is an anachronism. We have video recording technology, practically infinite bandwidth, and near speed of light communicatio…

I have taken classes at several top private and public universities and except in a few smaller, more advanced classes few questions were asked during the professor's lectures. And only some of those questions were helpful to the majority of the class. Having discussed this with many other students I believe this is typical, at least in US universities. (I have heard it is even worse in European and Asian universities where interruptions are discouraged. Is this true?)

I believe this is due to the constraints of the tradional class format. It is simply impossible to both cover the material and answer very many questions in typical length of a class. This means that if the class has more than a small number of students their questions simply cannot be answered during the lecture.

This is why many larger classes are divided into sections with labs run by grad students. These smaller forums are are better for discussion but their quality depends on finding grad students who are good at teaching. This is also fundamentally not scalable.

Online learning has the potential to break thru this limitation. The recent wave of MOOCs are a huge improvement over the online classes of just a few years ago. I believe there is still lots of room for improvement from both tailoring the class to the individual student (e.g fast vs slow pace) and A/B testing which has only just begun to be applied.

Interestingly some of these improvements can be applied to tradional classes some of which are already using online discussion forums and automated grading. A hybrid approach (in person lectures and discussions with full online support) will probably provide the best overall quality but will be more expensive than a pure online approach and not practical for people who can't physically attend classes.

Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#37

Post by michaelochurch »

The issue with Coursera is the synchronous model. The material's good and the selection's excellent, and they deserve a lot of props for solving such a critical problem. College life is sanitized. Real World interjections are rare enough, at that age, to be handled case-by-case when it comes to extensions and such. Adult life is messy and complicated-- sick parents become more common, job demands fluctuate-- and synchronous education is just brittle. I didn't find Coursera courses to be "too fast". The paces were fine, so long as I didn't have fires in the rest of life.

It's not a "dirty secret", though. One should know and expect that. If anything, low retention is a good thing insofar as it means that the courses are demanding and people who aren't dedicated trickle out.

I feel like we have three problems to solve in online education. I'm sure there are plenty more, but 4 stand out right now:

(1) Hidden node discovery. You're 23. You just learned Python. You want to be a Data Scientist in 3 years. How do you get there? "Data Scientist job" is one node, and there are a bunch of prerequisites to those (hidden nodes) and prerequisites to those. How do you navigate this network? The 23-year-old programmer doesn't know where those hidden nodes are. In other words, the Google for Learning and Development.

(2) Forward learning. Recommendations. Things that would be interesting to a person that she doesn't know she wants to know, because she doesn't know that it exists. Since there's a lot of investment here (you're not just buying a book and possibly reading it, but anticipating putting 50+ cognitively intense hours into a course) it would be nice if the service gave indications as to why it was making those rec's.

(3) Interactivity and (buzzword warning) "gameification". When you haul out an 800-word machine learning textbook, you often have to go for a long time (hours) without the "kick". There's a flat array of 50 exercises of which 25 are easy, and 25 are really hard and will take a long time (they might be worth doing, but they aren't quick) and it's hard to pick which ones to focus on. The programming exercises in texts often don't get your creative juices flowing. Not a lot of people can get through long spells without feedback, and the skill of "making your own feedback" seems to be losing ground in our distracted culture.

(4) "Social". Online study groups. This is Big and I don't know how it's going to evolve. How do we keep quality control in place and make sure that our automated expert discovery mechanisms work?

Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#38

Post by zabramow »

I'm a big fan of Codeacademy myself. But, as someone who doesn't come from a technical background, I feel like I'm often completing many of their lessons, but not internalizing the information or actually learning how to code.

I don't plan on giving up, but I'm curious if others have had that experience or if I'm the only person who's figured out how to use Codeacademy without actually learning to code.

Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#39

Post by gingerlime »

tsiki wrote: post #16

I agree with the sentiment, but I wonder if having a low barrier of entry is really the solution, or does having a low barrier of entry average out to a low level of initial commitment. It'd be interesting to see if an online course for which you pay for would be better at retention. From a business point of view, they could even offer to give you the money back if you finish the course, or use some other retention t…

I totally agree that commitment is a major part of any educational success, and paying for something drastically increases our commitment and motivation.

At kenHub[1], we offer anatomy online training for medical students, physiotherapists etc. Since we are working in a collaboration with the Charité University[2], we offer students at the university the same content other students pay for, completely free. Our statistics shows around a factor of 8x in engagement of paying vs. non-paying students[3].

[1]https://www.kenhub.com [2]http://www.charite.de/en/charite [3]http://imgur.com/5eG3teP

Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

#40

Post by hkon »

An anecdote, I followed this course this year, https://www.coursera.org/course/growtogreatness and the number of student increased every week.

The guy presenting, Ed Hess, was very skilled and interesting and the material was very relevant. I also enjoyed the discussion of various homework on the course forum.

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