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I am always amazed when people make comments like this: "The results of the University of Texas at Austin’s first full-semester foray into massive open online
by ChuckMcM 7y ago
I am always amazed when people make comments like this:
"The results of the University of Texas at Austin’s first full-semester foray into massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are in."
"Professor Michael Webber’s “Energy 101,” which had an enrollment that peaked at around 44,000 students, had 5,000 receive a certificate of completion — about 13 percent of the roughly 38,000 students who ultimately participated."
So let's unpack this a bit. Professor Webber created a class called "Energy 101" and processed 5,000 students through it to completion. Your typical 100 level undergraduate class might have anywhere from 50 to 200 students in it.
UT Austin this year had 8690 freshman total.
So assuming the largest possible class of 200, this professor in one semester taught the equivalent of 25 semesters of 200 student classes, in one semester.
Why should we care that 32,000 people signed up and then said "Woah, really don't have the time to commit to this right now?"
It is one thing to move to a campus dorm and start studying some topic. It is quite another to click a few links on a web page and say, "Yeah, that could be an interesting class."
- fujiters 7y agoExactly. I commonly enroll in Coursera classes just to get access to the video lectures for later perusal for information relevant to my work and interests.
- slooonz 7y agoAnd remember that certificates of completion are now for paying users only. I’ve personally got a passing grade on some courses that didn't translate into a certificate because it's not interesting to me professionally and therefore don't pay for it. I still wouldn’t call it a failure.
- dpflan 7y agoIndeed, the sharing of information and knowledge obtainment has scaled. What are the traditional metrics of impact of a brick-and-mortar course? Is it just grades? Or is it deeper: students who go on to use the knowledge gained to find new ideas, new careers, etc? Reaching order(s) of magnitude more students probably means more of the latter effect/metric. For something like academics, I would think that the more people who have been exposed to useful information and peers interested in these ideas the better. @turadg recounts how Coursera created statistics for partners: """The completion “rate” does not matter because the denominator is a very noisy signal. It’s a count of enrollments and what does “enrollment” signal in an online course, when it takes two clicks from a tweet.""" >> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20975443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20975443
- pixelperfect 7y agoAlso, taking but not completing MOOC shouldn't count as a failure. I've enrolled in ~8 courses on Coursera and never completed any of them, but I still gained a lot of value from what I learned in those courses.