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Comment by sghill | Hacker News Reader

    When 90% of your "students" fail to complete the courses, you have an epic failure on your hands. MOOCs are not working.

I completed every course I signed up for when I was going to university. Completion percentage was important because I was, and still am, paying to be there. As a result, I enrolled in very little that I was simply curious about. Virtually every class I took was a step toward a degree.

Since graduating, I've enrolled in a handful of MOOCs. I've finished less than half of these courses, but they have satisfied my curiosity and have given me something new and different to learn. I most certainly would not have paid for the experience, but I feel I'm better off because of it. I'd say this is working and far from an epic failure.

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It starts to look a little different when you see people trumpeting MOOCs as "the future of higher education," though.

The thing about MOOCs is that to attract funding, media attention, and participation from big-name universities and top teaching talent -- all the things you'd desperately want to have if you were the one pitching them, in other words -- they really need MOOCs to work as something bigger than just a sideline for the intellectually curious, because the market for "a sideline for the intellectually curious" isn't big enough to attract any of those things on its own. It's a niche market at best.

Higher education as a sector, on the other hand, is anything but a niche market; so if MOOCs could be positioned as The Future of Higher Education, the thing that is going to replace universities in the 21st century, that would suit their advocates' interests nicely. But the data coming out of the MOOC experiments to date make them look less and less like the sort of thing you'd want to bet your kid's future on exclusively if you had any alternatives at all, which undermines that positioning.

For people fully devoted to studying, and with some sort of extrinsic incentive to complete the courses, I imagine that the completion rate would be significantly higher. When I was at MIT, some of the courses worked almost exactly like MOOCs do now, and just as many people completed those as the traditional courses.

With MOOCs, a ton of the takers are not full-time students. I've taken some MOOC courses and only completed one (probabilistic graphical models). The main reason is that I have much higher priorities now, and the courses are on a strict schedule. The first time there's a choice between getting a piece of code finished that I need for a business deal done and finishing a problem set, that problem set is not getting finished.

In other words, it works as much as you want it to work. Similar to how a "real" college experience works, with the difference being a significant financial investment.

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