Since the barrier to entry for enrollment is zero, compared to traditional education, directly comparing them is rather unfair.
Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
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Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#12I 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…
That's why I prefer Udacity's approach: they have the tradicional weekly classes when they open the course, but after that they're open enrolment. Start and finnish anytime you want.
Unfortunately, they have much less courses available, and they're all more or less computer science related.
Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#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 peer-to-peer grading and evaluations, but there's obviously a big desire for the self-study mode, which is enabled for a few of our classes currently.
We're also introducing things like Signature Track, which some students sign up for just to encourage themselves to make it to the end (and it seems to work for many of them).
We'll keep experimenting to see what makes students both happy and successful. :-)
Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#14I'm curious about enrollment trends.
Having taken online courses from the start my sense is that enrollment/participation is slowing. The bulletin boards of some classes are pretty dead on the first run.
Its not crazy to think that the people most likely to take the classes would participate right away and finding the next batch of students will be harder.
Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#15A relevant graph: http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
IMO for a class with tens of thousands people signed up, 5% retention rate is not really that bad.
Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#16I 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 trick, like have people calling you to create some social pressure if you seem to be falling behind.
Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#17I 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.
Personally I find the synchronous model helps me complete the course, as it removes the temptation to put things off.
Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#18I 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…
There is something to be said for class participants having some "skin in the game" so to speak. But I think at this stage, the companies/organizations involved are most focused on getting the most people to experience the courses--which having a fee would certainly diminish. As someone else wrote, I expect that these will become more modular over time. It's only natural that they're mimicking traditional product classes to start--but it's hard to believe that's necessarily the optimum chunk size, especially for those doing this as a relatively casual part-time thing.
Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#19The author says courses shouldn't have deadlines, but then talks about retention that's measured as of the deadlines.
I signed up for the Hinton neural network class when it was almost over, and completed it well after it ended.
Was I "retained"? Did I not count as completing the class?
Just because there's deadlines doesn't mean you have to finish it by the deadline.
Re: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention
#20Taking a Coursera course is hard work. I've taken 3 courses so for (one on databases and two on algorithms) over the past year and a half. This is about as much as I can manage (I work full time and have a family), even though I would like to take more (so many interesting to choose from). But the main reason for this limit is the amount of work it takes, not how the course is presented, or how well written the mails are.
For me, the pace of the course is actually a plus. If there were no deadline, I simply would not get around to doing it. I remember when I first found all the MIT courses on-line (several years ago). I really wanted to take some of them, but because there was no schedule and no deadline, I never got around to taking any of them. It's only with Coursera that I have actually taken (and finished) any.
I've written about my experience of all three courses on my blog. The latest was Algorithms: Design and Analysis, part 2 http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...