We could come up with a bunch of excuses about why online education will always have worse retention, or we could figure out ways to fix it. Or we could ask wh

We could come up with a bunch of excuses about why online education will always have worse retention, or we could figure out ways to fix it. Or we could ask whether it is a problem. I'm not sure that it is. I don't think the numbers are surprising or unnatural at all. The thing to compare them against is not traditional education but rather the patterns of all people who take the autodidactic route.. every person who has ever picked up a book and not finished it. Even then, the comparison isn't perfect. In fact, we could argue that low retention numbers are actually a good thing for non-credit courses. It means that the content is challenging and focused, and that people are able to discover early whether it is or isn't for them or cherry-pick the content that they need and move on. If there are usability problems, fix them. But if participant retention got dramatically higher, I'd worry.