Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

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It cracks me up that all of the early comments on this thread are so insistent that course completion shouldn't be a goal. Anyone who has taught a college course can tell you that self-reported satisfaction rates are useless as an educational metric. Everyone "wants" to learn, but almost nobody puts in the effort. MOOCs have provided this hype-driven bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything.

Course completion is a valid goal, and an important number. The point that I'm making is that a 5% completion rate is still a success, when multiplied by the massive number of people enrolling.

For an individual, if you watched the first three videos of linear algebra and stopped, you didn't learn the subject and can't honestly claim you took the course. If you finished it past-deadline but did all the exercises, you're probably ready to take the next course.

Udacity and Coursera are a step forward. Perfect? Far from it. Ready to replace Stanford? No, not even close. Is the world better with them than it would be without them? Absolutely.

Education, in technology, is there mainly to give you a root set and confidence. If you actually want to get into machine learning, you have to start reading papers anyway. That goes whether you're a graduate student or a DIYer who's been in industry for almost a decade like me.

It seems like they have a chicken and egg problem. If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means), then why bother completing them? Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

They can't expect valid results until the utility of the product is valuable.

it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

Same comment as michaelo.

why does the completion rate matter? If 100,000 people sign up, and 5% complete the course, that's 5k people.

The US is graduating around 12k CS majors per year, so 5k seems like a material number of students to educate.

> If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means),

The combination of lecture, graded exercise, guided reading (usually) and time constraints that Coursera and EdX courses have is, IMO/IME, a very good combination for learning that makes them better than many other alternatives for the purposes of learning (Udacity is, comparatively, fairly bad at some parts of this.)

> Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

I think that completion is a bad metric. One of the benefits of MOOCs is that it lowers the sunk cost of entry which encourages broader enrollment, particularly enrollment by people who are experimenting with the content or less certain that outside commitments will be able to be contained in a way that allows completion.

The idea that % complete is a measure of how many people are deriving an educational benefit is wrong.

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