Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

The hard truth is that the student gets out of a class what they put into it. I have finished 3 Coursera classes, two of which gave certificates. All three were well worth my time, but I worked my tail off to complete the challenging assignments. I found the support staff (TAs) helpful in the forums. Life does get in the way some times but all three coures had at least a week to finish an assignment, typically two and the option of applying late days on quizzes.

The biggest thing I noticed were the clueless forum posts by students who obviously had not read much of the provided material. Two of the classes had material similar to ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" and this was largely ignored. I think we are seeing the fall out of the distraction of modern society. Sadly, tl;dr doesn't work with complex technical material.

That said, it was a privilege to interact with motivated fellow students. Their input in the forums helped eliminate misconceptions.

By the way, the statistics for our Data Analysis class were similar to those from the OP - from the instructor: "There were approximately 102,000 students enrolled in the course, about 51,000 watched videos, 20,000 did quizzes, and 5,500 did/graded the data analysis assignments."

My wife also wanted to take that Introductory Human Physiology course. She's a freelance medical translator, so improving her knowledge of that subject matter will have a direct positive impact on her career. She's not among the people who Daphne Koller said "never really intended to seriously take the class in the first place" - she bought the suggested books ahead of time, marked it all down on her calendar, and planned out time to work on it.

What she found was that the course was way more difficult than the description suggested, and proved to be well above what she could understand with her current background. She watched the first video and found that it was going to take way more time than the course description predicted, because she would have to try to fill in a tremendous amount of background knowledge that the teachers presumed. On the plus side, from the course forums she found about resources (videos, etc.) that were more at her current level, and has been working through these.

The comments made elsewhere about the synchronous model for these courses is probably right for her case - she had to wait a number of weeks in order to find out it wasn't the right class for her. This is what you expect when you're in college, at which point you either drop the class and maybe find a different one to take, or tough it out in a class that's not as interesting or useful as you'd hoped. I hope online courses can do better than this.

Hi, Pamela. I am a long-time user of Coursera and I love the site.

I have feedback for you as regards retention of students.

The number one thing is due dates and late penalties. If I sign up for a course and work through the first few weeks and get everything done, and then I miss a deadline because life happens, suddenly I am no longer able to get a 100% in the class. I do not mind getting an A- in a class if it happens naturally because the material is difficult, but losing my A+ or A because I am 12 hours late on an assignment ruins the experience for me. I usually drop a class when this happens and wait for it to come around again.

A counter-example to prove the rule: Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms course. The last time he gave it, he had late penalties and I only had time to get through the first two weeks of the class without getting behind. This time around, there were no late penalties. Being enormously busy with other things, I was not able to keep up with the class as it went along. However, because I lost no credit for doing things late, I was able to complete the entire class in the final 10 days of course and I got an A. I have no problem staying up all night to finish interesting programming assignments and quizzes, but I need to be allowed to do this on my schedule.

I strongly encourage you to encourage your professors to do away with late penalties. It should be up to us as students to determine what our work schedule is. I know for some courses, those that use peer-evaluation, this is impossible, but many more could take this route than currently do.

I agree that Signature Track does have the effect of encouraging one to keep up with the class.

tl;dr: What's at stake here is the proper roles of ed tech in education. MOOCs are media, only one part of the ecosystem that is developing here, and I think that finding a central role for great educators is key.

Coursera and other MOOCs are media properties that monetize viewership (thorugh certificates rather than ads). As media properties, michaelochurch and others are right that the synchronous model isn't really going to work in the long term.

I think ed tech should be about connecting teachers with the content they need to teach (and I'd include self-educators amongst 'teachers' here). Students need synchronous access to teachers, but those teachers don't necessarily have to have created that content just now. This suggests that online education might look more like a 1:100 teacher-student ratio rather than 1:100k. Nothing's more motivating and engaging than a human being.

Personally, my best experiences have come from two sources: self-study from great materials and guided study from great teachers. This suggests that a role for ed tech might be connecting great teacher with great content rather than broadcasting teacher-as-content. Personalization, engagement, motivation, etc all come for free if we empower great teachers rather than seek to replace them.

It's misguided to think that some professor from a great school can best deliver the content to all audiences. Imagine great open content accessible to every teacher for use in their own classrooms. With an inverted model of teaching, the lets them push content out to the students for self-study and then have synchronous classes where they, the teacher, can motivate and customize the delivery of tough concepts for their particular group of students.

> I think Coursera and EdX can do much better at using their design and content marketing talent to make these classes more accessible and successful.

There's an interesting balance here. Professors I've talked to bemoan the lack of 'support' from Coursera (usually the universities provide a pot of money for profs to use themselves). But at the same time they would balk at some marketing guru coming in an 'spinning' their course. Profs are used to large amounts of freedom in their courses and aren't used to incorporating feedback from the outside into their plans.

It's a tough line to walk I think: freedom vs accessibility.