Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

It's quite possible that this is a function of having so little open content out there right now. I can imagine a future where the background your wife needed would be easy to get from the platform itself, so that the profs' demanding teaching could serve audiences both with and without that background. Right now many of these courses must feel like skyhooks but once they're embedded in a web of knowledge (an earlier commenter called these 'nodes') they'll be more accessible i think.

There's still a huge problem of collecting and sequencing these nodes and I think many students will need direct contact with instructors of some sort to do this.

Before I read the fine article (which I recommend you read too), I was going to react just to the headline. And that reaction is still there. The reason we (correctly) criticize lack of retention in online education is that online education makes apparent metrics that show the lack of retention. But I would suggest, for learned discussion by all the participants here, that most forms of classroom learning, and especially compulsory secondary schooling in most of the developed world, suffers from a very bad lack of engagement on the part of the students. (Some of the comments posted here before this comment tell stories about that.) A high school student may attend classes often enough to avoid being expelled and gain a diploma, but the student may operate in "regurgitate and forget" mode the whole time he is in high school, not really remembering anything he supposedly was taught. The one kind of deep learning many high school students engage in is learning how to pretend to be studying. If online education develops better demonstrations of learner acquisition of knowledge and skill than mere seat time in a classroom, it may be a powerful force for exposing the dirty secret of classroom education.

Some more of what you are saying, e.g., about marketing, design, and e-mails to students, definitely would help. However, I assumed that such things were asking too much of poor schools and that, really, the HN readers who dug through K&R, etc. on their own with no marketing, design, encouraging e-mails, etc. didn't really need such nice hand holding.

But I will say, at some crucial points for me, some teachers did play a crucial role: The college I graduated from then had a quite good math department, and some of the teaching aimed at me personally in some of the courses was just excellent and got me going so that I could continue on to 'the next level' in math via independent work. Then for on-line learning, as progress is made on the first, and easiest work, many of the students will need some 'personalized TLC' or risk getting off track, slowing down, and stopping.

Part of such TLC will be overviews: That is, it needs to be more clear to students what the value, purpose, or promise is of various parts of the course.

Another part of TLC is that students need to write some things, e.g., homework exercises, term papers, something like lab reports, and have their work read by an expert and 'corrected'. E.g., a place to learn nicely polished skills in writing about functions, maps, mappings, relations, etc. is in a theorem proving course in abstract algebra where a good professor actually corrects some student homework. Then when work with functions, maps, ..., in computing, will get the notation and terminology right; without such TLC, often won't get those things right. E.g., earlier today I read a little about hashing passwords, and the material mentioned a function "between the hashes and passwords". No, "between" is not appropriate. The usual description, and appropriate, is a function f from the set of hashes to the set of passwords. To be clear and not just picky, function f may not define a function g from the set of passwords to the set of hashes because there may be a password p such that there is no hash h so that f(h) = p. That is, the function f may not be 'onto', i.e., 'surjective' as at

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surjective_function

There's an old lesson in 'education': Get the student able to continue on in learning on their own. For that, usually some 'personalized TLC' is needed at a few crucial points in a student's development. To be really successful, the on-line approach will have to include some of that TLC also.

So successfully completion of the course won't require watching the videos.