Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

That's still thousands (tens or hundreds) of students who passed. So perhaps the 'click-through' rate for MOOC is the same as it is for ads?

I feel Professor Thrun's work has had a positive impact on my work, even though I'm one of the students who didn't pass on time. I gradually worked my way through the material while riding the Caltrain and have a greater understanding of ML and AI topics. So it's not a total wash.

Also, by admitting he may not have been right publicly he disarms critics overall. Smart.

1) Access the videos/materials for all time (even when the course is no longer open).

2) Try out different courses / professors

3) Learn the basics (i.e., watch only week 1 out of 6); or perhaps watch all videos but ignore the testing materials. After all, if there is no real credential involved, I might only care about gaining an understanding of the subject, rather than prove I understand it through testing.

I am a full time student (not in CS), and in addition to my real life course load I am currently taking Networking, Cryptography, and Algorithms. There is no way I will have the time to complete more than 1, or MAYBE 2, of the 3.

In other words, I view my low completion rate as a huge success. Coursera seems to have realized this fact. They have just started doing pre-course surveys that ask you how many videos you intend to watch (none, 25%, 50%, all), and they ask how much of the homework you intend to do.

Of course, offering degrees or college credit, especially in exchange for cash, will obviously increase completion rates, but mainly by dissuading people like me from signing up.

1.6 million times 5% = 80,000. Still an impressive number.

I've probably started 20 MOOCs and completed 3.5, so I'm part of that "low completion" statistic. I often fall behind the posted deadlines because I have so much on my plate. That's not a knock on MOOCs; if it's a knock on anyone, it's on me. The quality of MOOCs is (IMO) as high as for most big-lecture college courses. (It's not yet as good as for a 20-person course.) However, when you have a full-time job plus side projects plus family, and you don't have the social pressure of having to pass 8-10 courses per year, you have to be really motivated to complete the work, especially within the deadlines. But is it a loss or gain to the world if someone completes a MOOC 6 weeks late? Or gets only 60% of the material? It may not be as much of a gain as the traditional college course provides, but it's a gain in absolute terms.

If those 80,000 students are getting the same quality of course as they'd get at Stanford, that's fucking huge. Not a small accomplishment at all.

I wish people wouldn't write off MOOCs because, yes, they're the crappy first iteration that only early adopters care to power through. They're not ready to replace traditional education, the latter being a gigantic trillion-dollar problem that touches all sorts of deep sociological problems.

The problem is that you have a lot of hucksters in education (cough Knewton cough) who massively overpromise, raise a lot of money, and don't deliver much. They've damaged the reputation of the space immensely. The truth, however, is that online education is a good thing and it's (albeit slowly, with fits and starts) getting better. If there's anything worrying to me, it's that our ability to educate each other is, while improving, not doing so quite as fast as the rate of technological change. But I guess that's a good problem for the world to have.