I think a major problem with retention is that the course is not a recognised qualification. The next step for online education is get a real qualification tha

I think a major problem with retention is that the course is not a recognised qualification. The next step for online education is get a real qualification that improves your job prospects through places like Coursera. Also I think there are a bunch of other hacks such as collaborative motivation (getting a group of members to commit to each other to complete the course and automatically reporting to each other when they have completed each section where everyone in the group has collective responsibility to help each person in the group to complete the course.