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Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course

78 points by gtCameron 13y ago

sown 13y ago
> the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. That's still thousands (tens or hundreds) of students who passed. So perhaps the 'click-through' rate for MOOC is the same as it is for ads? I feel Professor Thrun's work has had a positive impact on my work, even though I'm one of the students who didn't pass on time. I gradually worked my way through the material while riding the Caltrain and have a greater understanding of ML and AI topics. So it's not a total wash. Also, by admitting he may not have been right publicly he disarms critics overall. Smart.
- gallamine 13y ago
  Agreed. I took 90% of the AI Udacity class and it completely changed my thinking on many things. I didn't "finish" it though, but it's impact has been very large on my career thus far (and I'm really trying to not be hyperbolic). At the very least, he gave me confidence. He's very good about that.
- berberous 13y ago
  Personally, I have signed up for maybe 50 MOOCs, but only completed 2, and really engaged in any level with maybe 3-5. But this was intentional. Signing up lets me: 1) Access the videos/materials for all time (even when the course is no longer open). 2) Try out different courses / professors 3) Learn the basics (i.e., watch only week 1 out of 6); or perhaps watch all videos but ignore the testing materials. After all, if there is no real credential involved, I might only care about gaining an understanding of the subject, rather than prove I understand it through testing. I am a full time student (not in CS), and in addition to my real life course load I am currently taking Networking, Cryptography, and Algorithms. There is no way I will have the time to complete more than 1, or MAYBE 2, of the 3. In other words, I view my low completion rate as a huge success. Coursera seems to have realized this fact. They have just started doing pre-course surveys that ask you how many videos you intend to watch (none, 25%, 50%, all), and they ask how much of the homework you intend to do. Of course, offering degrees or college credit, especially in exchange for cash, will obviously increase completion rates, but mainly by dissuading people like me from signing up.
  - seren 13y ago
    I am pretty sure that if most MOOCs would offer a demo of the first few week courses without having to sign "officially", the attrition rate would be much lower. I see plenty of interesting courses on Coursera, but the one page + one video description is not enough to understand how the course will feel like and if I want to commit few hours of my life to follow it. I always hesitate to sign because I have the feeling that by signing, I take a solemn oath that I will finish the course... (so at least I am not contributing to the bad metrics, but I feel like the metrics is skewed for wrong reasons anyway)
    - randomdata 13y ago
      I'm not sure I agree. If the course is interesting, I will sign up anyway, while still not completing it. That is, unless I can access the content without signing up, but that does not seem to be common. I think the real problem is that MOOCs are not brick and mortar schools, and any attempts to mirror a brick and mortar school will only detract value from the offerings. I don't sign up to do homework or take tests, I sign up to learn something. I will then take what I learned and apply it to something practical in my own life. If successful, it proves to me that I understand the content well enough to accomplish what I set out to achieve. I don't feel the need to prove that to anyone else. A certificate of achievement hanging on my wall means nothing. Of course, the real issue here is that the business model was based on the idea of selling graduates to interested industry partners. If I don't successfully complete the tests, I'm not valuable to them.
  - chilldream 13y ago
    I've finished about a dozen MOOCs, even TA'ed a couple and my story is similar. I'm usually enrolled in at least three courses with no intention of finishing all of them.
  - stefap2 13y ago
    If I remember correctly we called it "audit a class". Visit lectures without actually taking the course for credit.
mlyang 13y ago
The thinking about MOOCs and their success metrics is flawed. We wouldn't measure the success of Wikipedia by the percentage of people who've read an entire Wiki article top to bottom for a particular topic they've searched for, why would we expect the same for MOOC courses? The reality is that it's just a great social good that these courses are available online and accessible to the select few who should choose to fully utilize them. Everyone's too fixated on the completion rates for these courses. The reality is that the people who are checking out these courses are doing it mostly out of intellectual curiosity at this point, so they have no reason to finish certificates, or finish courses, or watch lectures that they're not interested in. These people have no incentive other than to pick and choose, and to idealistically expect that people will put themselves through the downsides of education (HW, exams, watching the boring lectures when they can just pick the interesting lectures) is unrealistic, and certainly not an indication that "MOOCs have failed."
- sown 13y ago
  I think what changed Thrun's mind was the less than successful SJSU experiment: http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education-revolution-drifts-off-course http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education...
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - mhurron 13y ago
    I'd love to finish that math course if I could log back in.
- my_username_is_ 13y ago
  It would be very interesting to see what types of things people go on to do with the knowledge that they've gained from MOOC's. The value created based on knowledge that otherwise wouldn't be accessible would be a very interesting metric to try and measure
- saraid216 13y ago
monochr 13y ago
I don't sign up for courses that have self paced study unless I feel like I want to take the final exam which may at some point mean something. But courses with deadlines I spam subscribe the hell out of. The majority are available indefinitely once you subscribe and I may be interested in revisiting them at some point over the next year or so. Even if they delete the content after the class finishes I just use a small script to keep track of the dates and download everything once the final lecture is delivered. You can try and recreate scarcity online but it will backfire. I only complete about 1-5% of the classes I've signed up for because I want the option of picking one that might turn out to be interesting later. Places like udacity and coursera would be much better off having class material public forever while having recurring deadlines for submissions only. The only people who would sign up to classes then would be those who are interested in submitting materials.
michaelochurch 13y ago
As Thrun was being praised by Friedman, and pretty much everyone else, for having attracted a stunning number of students--1.6 million to date--he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about the power of new forms of free online education: the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. 1.6 million times 5% = 80,000. Still an impressive number. I've probably started 20 MOOCs and completed 3.5, so I'm part of that "low completion" statistic. I often fall behind the posted deadlines because I have so much on my plate. That's not a knock on MOOCs; if it's a knock on anyone, it's on me. The quality of MOOCs is (IMO) as high as for most big-lecture college courses. (It's not yet as good as for a 20-person course.) However, when you have a full-time job plus side projects plus family, and you don't have the social pressure of having to pass 8-10 courses per year, you have to be really motivated to complete the work, especially within the deadlines. But is it a loss or gain to the world if someone completes a MOOC 6 weeks late? Or gets only 60% of the material? It may not be as much of a gain as the traditional college course provides, but it's a gain in absolute terms. If those 80,000 students are getting the same quality of course as they'd get at Stanford, that's fucking huge. Not a small accomplishment at all. I wish people wouldn't write off MOOCs because, yes, they're the crappy first iteration that only early adopters care to power through. They're not ready to replace traditional education, the latter being a gigantic trillion-dollar problem that touches all sorts of deep sociological problems. The problem is that you have a lot of hucksters in education (cough Knewton cough) who massively overpromise, raise a lot of money, and don't deliver much. They've damaged the reputation of the space immensely. The truth, however, is that online education is a good thing and it's (albeit slowly, with fits and starts) getting better. If there's anything worrying to me, it's that our ability to educate each other is, while improving, not doing so quite as fast as the rate of technological change. But I guess that's a good problem for the world to have.
aashaykumar92 13y ago
MOOCs can't expect to replace universities right now, it just won't happen. But if they integrate their platforms in a way to HELP college students and even adults, their popularity will blow up so that in the future, it will be more realistic to think that MOOCs may be THE go-to for a higher level education. Focusing on the college population and growing that is the best way to begin...being ubiquitous from the start has not and will not work, it's just too big of a problem. There are two large problems with MOOCs right now that are documented in the article but not well enough supported IMO: 1) There are no transferrable credits to colleges and 2) They are free. And the two problems go unsurprisingly hand in hand, and they both have to be solved simultaneously if MOOCs are going to work. The ideal scenario would be that each course costs somewhere around $150 and courses can be transferred WITH credits to as many accredited institutions as possible. Why? Well firstly, once you pay for something, the average persons's conscious will naturally have that commitment in the back of their minds and will not want the investment to be a sunk cost. Furthermore, if credits are offered, college kids will be able to take a variety of courses in fields that they may want to try out and the more institutions that allow credits from MOOCs, the more students will feel comfortable taking these courses. It will be a great outlet for students to use in a variety of ways. The SJSU example is extremely poor as the sample is way too limited and as mentioned in the article, the bulk of students who signed up for courses were in limited situations.
- varelse 13y ago
  If I had to pay $150/course, that would end my usage of MOOCs. In contrast, I'd be happy to pay $5-$10/month for overall access to Coursera or Udacity (probably just Coursera actually given the quality issues I've seen on Udacity). But the minute you try to shoehorn me back into the traditional mode of learning, I'm going back to reading books at my own pace and timing. Can we pretty please finally have the 21st century that should have started sometime during the last decade?
  - aashaykumar92 13y ago
    That doesn't solve the problem of completing a course, though.
fernly 13y ago
Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores). The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference. The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional social component. If they were viewed this way, a different business model might emerge.
- mhurron 13y ago
  > saved for future reference I wish that was possible with Coursera. I often need way more time then the structured course time. I don't interact with people on the forums so I don't care about that but locking me out of the videos means I don't get to see a lot of things I would like too.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    If you start a Coursera course and don't finish it, you usually have persistent access to the course videos.
    - AlexeyBrin 13y ago
      Not true for all courses (on Coursera), most of them will stop letting you access the videos after about 1 month from the course completion. However, you can download the videos once the course is finished.
      - waterlesscloud 13y ago
        It's definitely not my experience that "most" Coursera courses do this. Of my 12 completed classes, only one does not allow access to the videos. Some of these classes are 2 years old. The one that doesn't have the old videos sent out an email saying they were removing them when they re-ran the class with new videos a year later.
  - 13y ago
timr 13y ago
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 protective bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything. The self-delusion is so strong that people are denying what Thrun himself said: Udacity was (is?) a lousy product [1]. It doesn't do what it was supposed to do, which is educate more people for less money. The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds (or at least, maybe the world wants that, but that isn't what Thrun wants, and I admire his integrity -- a lot of folks in his shoes would just be desperately trying to keep the party going, rather than admitting early failure). If MOOCs are nothing more than a place where half-interested techies go to pretend to learn about AI, then they're pretty useless. [1] http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education-revolution-drifts-off-course http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education...
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  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.
slowjoe 13y ago
+1 to the "high course join, low course completion" crowd. One thing that I did at work was establish a betting pool with two other co-workers on the Coursera C++ course that finished in December - completers would collect from non-completers. That is my one Coursera completion. I'm pretty sure that attaching betting pools to MOOC sites would make a major difference to completion rates for participants.
capnrefsmmat 13y ago
I don't see why MOOCs are pitched as revolutionary in teaching. They're still fundamentally lecture-based, and lectures are a terrible way to teach. I'm most familiar with research in physics education, where an average intro physics class fills only 24% of students' gaps in understanding. On the other hand, some professors are experimenting with more interactive methods -- not less interactive MOOCs -- and getting three times better results: http://www.refsmmat.com/articles/shutup.html http://www.refsmmat.com/articles/shutup.html
- hershel 13y ago
  Very interesting link. Thanks. Based on the conclusion of this link, it would be interesting to combine MOOC courses for the lecture part, with a technology like knewton, which by monitoring exercises you do , learn about what areas you have problems(and perhaps about misconceptions) , and can guide you to relevant content.
- my_username_is_ 13y ago
  Udacity, Thurin's MOOC platform, is interactive and was designed to not simply follow the lecture style of current classrooms
  - saraid216 13y ago
    "Interactive" how? The quizzes? These have been a staple in current classrooms for a decades. Is there something else?
hojoff79 13y ago
I disagree that these are simply "books" and cannot supplement courses. There are many college students who simply attend lectures, turn in homework, ask a few questions and take their tests. MOOCs provide everything you need to have that experience virtually. I agree this model does not describe everyone, but I believe this is more an issue of motivation than resources. Going back to the comparison with textbooks, there are a good number of people who could teach themselves subjects purely out of textbooks if they were motivated. But even after mastering several subject in this way, your employment prospects and marketability are not significantly increased. Instead, people do their learning (online or in person) under the umbrella of a College, who can offer them "credit" / verification to the rest of the world, which in turn increases employment prospects and marketability. The MOOC product does not offer that benefit upon completion (they give you a certificate, but right now it is not respected at all and therefore does not give the desired effect), so only those interested in the intellectual knowledge have motivation to complete the MOOC courses (not surprisingly, a very low number of people). But I think if they give it more time they / the market could develop products that provide value for completion of these courses. Maybe some sort of independent service that tests and certifies completing students (i.e. what College Board has done for high school courses with the AP program). They could even track combinations of courses students complete to ensure a rounded knowledge of a subject area. That is just one idea off the top of my head, but the point remains that this is an economic issue of motivation and benefits for completion, not an issues of resources.
- xiaoma 13y ago
  >"Going back to the comparison with textbooks, there are a good number of people who could teach themselves subjects purely out of textbooks if they were motivated. But even after mastering several subject in this way, your employment prospects and marketability are not significantly increased." I intend to put that assumption to the test. I suspect that once GRE subject tests start falling, both my prospects and marketability will jump dramatically.
johngalt 13y ago
While I like the idea of making courses as independent as possible, some kind of suggested course track might help completion rates. I passed the original ai-class on schedule with distinction. Then when Udacity started I zipped through intro to CS as a review. When I took Norvig's 'Design of computer programs', it was a kick in the teeth. I knew pretty quick that I wasn't going to finish on schedule, then that I wasn't going to finish at all.
xiaoma 13y ago
I put about 20 hours a week of my time over the past 6 months or so into MOOCs, primarily on Coursera. I've also used Khan Academy, edX, and some non-MOOC materials like Code School in the past. I've definitely learned some great things, but it hasn't actually been the most efficient use of time. Rather than write a mini blog post here, I'll link to the actual blog post I recently wrote on it: http://logicmason.com/2013/self-directed-programming-and-computer-science-study-through-moocs/ http://logicmason.com/2013/self-directed-programming-and-com... To summarize the problems, the pre-requisites aren't always clear and are sometimes incomplete, the courses don't generally offer enough work that students can get help on, and set-up for the computing classes is often a huge pain. Finally, for me personally, the set pace is a serious detriment. I do much better if I can get the materials all at once and do 25% or more of a course in a weekend.
djs1sjd 13y ago
As others have noted, these MOOCs work great for people who already have a solid foundation in the skills of learning, whether they are highly-driven and parentally-supported high school students, college degree holders, or people who are equivalently self-taught. If you don't fall into one of the above categories, it is _very_ difficult to overcome the practical, and motivational challenges that stand in the way of success in these classes. Examples: a poor inner-city kid with serious challenges at home and at school, an out of work high-school/college drop-out who is years out of any sort of academic setting. At least in the US, the disadvantaged side of educational inequality spectrum is defined by these types of of people. Without a great deal of in-person support (whether by government via schools, their communities, or their families), it is unlikely that such people will be able to increase their education, MOOCs or otherwise. EDIT: added some clarifying wording.
varelse 13y ago
I enjoyed the Udacity AI course, but I was repeatedly frustrated by the many errors that were never corrected and especially Peter Norvig's nails on blackboard scribbling sounds with his felt tip. Am I the only one who could hear this? Overall, I think there was a real lack of attention to detail after an excellent job on getting the big picture right. That said, MOOCs have revolutionized my ability to keep up with technology trends and I spend 1-2 hours daily on Coursera and Udacity. I do not care whatsoever about certificates or completing courses. I just care about raw knowledge acquisition and reviewing previously learned material (i.e. refreshing my calculus, statistics, algorithms, and linear algebra skills). I personally think the future of this business will involve celebrity teachers like Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun putting together more polished versions of their courses and then allowing a cottage industry to grow around tutoring people through them at their own pace rather than shoehorning a freestyle approach to learning into effective semesters and quarters. If this is infotainment, it sure beats the likes of Fox News and MSNBC.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > I personally think the future of this business will involve celebrity teachers like Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun putting together more polished versions of their courses and then allowing a cottage industry to grow around tutoring people through them at their own pace rather than shoehorning a freestyle approach to learning into effective semesters and quarters. This is actually fairly similar to my own classroom designs, so I wanted to call it out for emphasis.
mcguire 13y ago
I think the point here is that if the goal is to provide at least some information (and entertainment, which is not worthless) to at least some of the numbers of students that sign up, then Udacity specifically and MOOCs in general are successful. On the other hand, if the goal is to provide an education that is as solid and as valued as a university, which Thrun seems to think his goal was, then Udacity and MOOCs are not succeeding. Further, if Udacity, which is a company that needs to make a profit, is going to succeed then it needs to change its focus.
nicholas73 13y ago
Another thing that lowers course completion rates, unmentioned yet, is that most of Udacity's classes are on the challenging side of college courses. They are mostly STEM classes and many equivalent to upper division courses as well. So it isn't surprising the NPR article reports only the most studious SJSU students benefited. The vast majority of SJSU students, and students from other colleges as well, would find these courses challenging also, with or without in-person support. I don't think that's an insurmountable problem, with the course notes being better designed and readily available (as compared to a disinterested professor + textbook). On the other side, many students don't bother talking to their professors and TAs anyway.
bakul 13y ago
May be they need to incentivize people differently: charge money to sign up for a course. If you finish it, you get it all back (or a certificate - your pick! If you are in the top 10% of the completers, you get a degree as well as your money). If you get through 75%, you get half back. If you get through 50% you get 25% back.
joyofdata 13y ago
I took and take several classes, so far on coursera and edX - and I love it. Taped lectures with quizzes, weekly assignments, exam and maybe even a peer-rated project are definitely a great way to learn something! My goal always is to finish with a certificate because this gives me an idea on how well I am doing. As a matter of fact I do not like Udacity very much. It is too playful and too unorganized compared to a lot of courses on coursera and pretty much all courses on edX. Udacity tries too hard to educate everybody by being very friendly at all times - this either leads to courses which start out all bubbly and funny and all of a sudden turn complex too suddenly - or courses that stay on that trivial level. MOOC is awesome but what Thrun apparently doesn't get is that this concept still requires dedication and disciplin from the student. And you can design your class whatever way you like - either the student has it or s/he doesn't. Also he is comparing apples and pears with his ratio #succesfull/#registered. #registered of course is a marketing driven KPI and sould be as high as possible, so every time somebody clicks "Learn free" it is counted. But you have to "register" to just figure out what the course really is about and whether it is worth taking! Also he is a business man and by switching to the new course format it is much easier for Udacity to monetarize - what a surprise. Opposed to edX and coursera, Udacity is kind of a one-man-show and he is maybe too ambitious and lacks patience (see biking with somebody else). An article on my experience: http://www.joyofdata.de/blog/social-network-analysis-lada-adamic-coursera/ http://www.joyofdata.de/blog/social-network-analysis-lada-ad...
joyofdata 13y ago
Udacity does not equal MOOC - It is just one platform offering online courses and it is inferior in quality and conception to most courses on edx.org and coursera.org. Thrun has a big ego and thinks because he didn't succeed with HIS goals - then the concept of interactive and gradid online learning is doomed. No matter how smart he might be - but that is simply stupid.
russelluresti 13y ago
Thrun's new objective - to give industry a voice in the education process, is a valid objective. Most of the research shows that what people learn in school only contributes in a minor way to what they do - they learn most of what they need to know on-the-job. Udacity's new direction will allow companies to help potential prospects acquire those skills beforehand, in this general education-augmented way. It's not a bad idea, and it's definitely something that was needed. However, it is sad to see one of the most vocal people toss aside the original goal of providing education to the under-priveleged to help them escape poverty. Just saying that poor people have a different set of challenges that make online classes a "poor fit" for them is the easy way out. It's also sad to hear him say that the true value proposition of education is employment. The notion that education and employment are hand-in-hand related is the thing that holds back the education system the most. Education is about allowing people to move forward - advancing culture, science, technology, etc. so that we're not all stuck plowing fields with oxen. While capitalism ties these advancements to employment and profit, the connection is based entirely on how things are done now, and not how things could or should be done (or even how they were done in the past).
jero25 13y ago
http://www.freeitonlinecourses.com/free-online-courses-with-certificate/ http://www.freeitonlinecourses.com/free-online-courses-with-... For free online courses with certificate have a look at the above link
Executor 13y ago
I have been using online courses for a while, here is my pitch: Most online courses are still under the old mindset of the conservative education model. Why does a course have a start and end date? I learn on my OWN time since I'm constrained by full-time employment. Why does a course have tests/exams? I came here to learn not obtain a badge, degree, or a set of meaningless numbers/grades. Why does a course NOT have a programming/application-centric method of learning? Why does an online course not have GREAT material and resources (i.e. lackluster application tests, labs, programming projects)? All these block me from doing what I want when I join an online course - to learn.

78 points by gtCameron 13y ago

sown 13y ago

> the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. That's still thousands (tens or hundreds) of students who passed. So perhaps the 'click-through' rate for MOOC is the same as it is for ads? I feel Professor Thrun's work has had a positive impact on my work, even though I'm one of the students who didn't pass on time. I gradually worked my way through the material while riding the Caltrain and have a greater understanding of ML and AI topics. So it's not a total wash. Also, by admitting he may not have been right publicly he disarms critics overall. Smart.

gallamine 13y ago
Agreed. I took 90% of the AI Udacity class and it completely changed my thinking on many things. I didn't "finish" it though, but it's impact has been very large on my career thus far (and I'm really trying to not be hyperbolic). At the very least, he gave me confidence. He's very good about that.
berberous 13y ago
Personally, I have signed up for maybe 50 MOOCs, but only completed 2, and really engaged in any level with maybe 3-5. But this was intentional. Signing up lets me: 1) Access the videos/materials for all time (even when the course is no longer open). 2) Try out different courses / professors 3) Learn the basics (i.e., watch only week 1 out of 6); or perhaps watch all videos but ignore the testing materials. After all, if there is no real credential involved, I might only care about gaining an understanding of the subject, rather than prove I understand it through testing. I am a full time student (not in CS), and in addition to my real life course load I am currently taking Networking, Cryptography, and Algorithms. There is no way I will have the time to complete more than 1, or MAYBE 2, of the 3. In other words, I view my low completion rate as a huge success. Coursera seems to have realized this fact. They have just started doing pre-course surveys that ask you how many videos you intend to watch (none, 25%, 50%, all), and they ask how much of the homework you intend to do. Of course, offering degrees or college credit, especially in exchange for cash, will obviously increase completion rates, but mainly by dissuading people like me from signing up.
- seren 13y ago
  I am pretty sure that if most MOOCs would offer a demo of the first few week courses without having to sign "officially", the attrition rate would be much lower. I see plenty of interesting courses on Coursera, but the one page + one video description is not enough to understand how the course will feel like and if I want to commit few hours of my life to follow it. I always hesitate to sign because I have the feeling that by signing, I take a solemn oath that I will finish the course... (so at least I am not contributing to the bad metrics, but I feel like the metrics is skewed for wrong reasons anyway)
  - randomdata 13y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. If the course is interesting, I will sign up anyway, while still not completing it. That is, unless I can access the content without signing up, but that does not seem to be common. I think the real problem is that MOOCs are not brick and mortar schools, and any attempts to mirror a brick and mortar school will only detract value from the offerings. I don't sign up to do homework or take tests, I sign up to learn something. I will then take what I learned and apply it to something practical in my own life. If successful, it proves to me that I understand the content well enough to accomplish what I set out to achieve. I don't feel the need to prove that to anyone else. A certificate of achievement hanging on my wall means nothing. Of course, the real issue here is that the business model was based on the idea of selling graduates to interested industry partners. If I don't successfully complete the tests, I'm not valuable to them.
- chilldream 13y ago
  I've finished about a dozen MOOCs, even TA'ed a couple and my story is similar. I'm usually enrolled in at least three courses with no intention of finishing all of them.
- stefap2 13y ago
  If I remember correctly we called it "audit a class". Visit lectures without actually taking the course for credit.

mlyang 13y ago

The thinking about MOOCs and their success metrics is flawed. We wouldn't measure the success of Wikipedia by the percentage of people who've read an entire Wiki article top to bottom for a particular topic they've searched for, why would we expect the same for MOOC courses? The reality is that it's just a great social good that these courses are available online and accessible to the select few who should choose to fully utilize them. Everyone's too fixated on the completion rates for these courses. The reality is that the people who are checking out these courses are doing it mostly out of intellectual curiosity at this point, so they have no reason to finish certificates, or finish courses, or watch lectures that they're not interested in. These people have no incentive other than to pick and choose, and to idealistically expect that people will put themselves through the downsides of education (HW, exams, watching the boring lectures when they can just pick the interesting lectures) is unrealistic, and certainly not an indication that "MOOCs have failed."

sown 13y ago
I think what changed Thrun's mind was the less than successful SJSU experiment: http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education-revolution-drifts-off-course http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education...
- deleted 13y ago
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- mhurron 13y ago
  I'd love to finish that math course if I could log back in.
my_username_is_ 13y ago
It would be very interesting to see what types of things people go on to do with the knowledge that they've gained from MOOC's. The value created based on knowledge that otherwise wouldn't be accessible would be a very interesting metric to try and measure
saraid216 13y ago

monochr 13y ago

I don't sign up for courses that have self paced study unless I feel like I want to take the final exam which may at some point mean something. But courses with deadlines I spam subscribe the hell out of. The majority are available indefinitely once you subscribe and I may be interested in revisiting them at some point over the next year or so. Even if they delete the content after the class finishes I just use a small script to keep track of the dates and download everything once the final lecture is delivered. You can try and recreate scarcity online but it will backfire. I only complete about 1-5% of the classes I've signed up for because I want the option of picking one that might turn out to be interesting later. Places like udacity and coursera would be much better off having class material public forever while having recurring deadlines for submissions only. The only people who would sign up to classes then would be those who are interested in submitting materials.

michaelochurch 13y ago

As Thrun was being praised by Friedman, and pretty much everyone else, for having attracted a stunning number of students--1.6 million to date--he was obsessing over a data point that was rarely mentioned in the breathless accounts about the power of new forms of free online education: the shockingly low number of students who actually finish the classes, which is fewer than 10%. Not all of those people received a passing grade, either, meaning that for every 100 pupils who enrolled in a free course, something like five actually learned the topic. 1.6 million times 5% = 80,000. Still an impressive number. I've probably started 20 MOOCs and completed 3.5, so I'm part of that "low completion" statistic. I often fall behind the posted deadlines because I have so much on my plate. That's not a knock on MOOCs; if it's a knock on anyone, it's on me. The quality of MOOCs is (IMO) as high as for most big-lecture college courses. (It's not yet as good as for a 20-person course.) However, when you have a full-time job plus side projects plus family, and you don't have the social pressure of having to pass 8-10 courses per year, you have to be really motivated to complete the work, especially within the deadlines. But is it a loss or gain to the world if someone completes a MOOC 6 weeks late? Or gets only 60% of the material? It may not be as much of a gain as the traditional college course provides, but it's a gain in absolute terms. If those 80,000 students are getting the same quality of course as they'd get at Stanford, that's fucking huge. Not a small accomplishment at all. I wish people wouldn't write off MOOCs because, yes, they're the crappy first iteration that only early adopters care to power through. They're not ready to replace traditional education, the latter being a gigantic trillion-dollar problem that touches all sorts of deep sociological problems. The problem is that you have a lot of hucksters in education (cough Knewton cough) who massively overpromise, raise a lot of money, and don't deliver much. They've damaged the reputation of the space immensely. The truth, however, is that online education is a good thing and it's (albeit slowly, with fits and starts) getting better. If there's anything worrying to me, it's that our ability to educate each other is, while improving, not doing so quite as fast as the rate of technological change. But I guess that's a good problem for the world to have.

aashaykumar92 13y ago

MOOCs can't expect to replace universities right now, it just won't happen. But if they integrate their platforms in a way to HELP college students and even adults, their popularity will blow up so that in the future, it will be more realistic to think that MOOCs may be THE go-to for a higher level education. Focusing on the college population and growing that is the best way to begin...being ubiquitous from the start has not and will not work, it's just too big of a problem. There are two large problems with MOOCs right now that are documented in the article but not well enough supported IMO: 1) There are no transferrable credits to colleges and 2) They are free. And the two problems go unsurprisingly hand in hand, and they both have to be solved simultaneously if MOOCs are going to work. The ideal scenario would be that each course costs somewhere around $150 and courses can be transferred WITH credits to as many accredited institutions as possible. Why? Well firstly, once you pay for something, the average persons's conscious will naturally have that commitment in the back of their minds and will not want the investment to be a sunk cost. Furthermore, if credits are offered, college kids will be able to take a variety of courses in fields that they may want to try out and the more institutions that allow credits from MOOCs, the more students will feel comfortable taking these courses. It will be a great outlet for students to use in a variety of ways. The SJSU example is extremely poor as the sample is way too limited and as mentioned in the article, the bulk of students who signed up for courses were in limited situations.

varelse 13y ago
If I had to pay $150/course, that would end my usage of MOOCs. In contrast, I'd be happy to pay $5-$10/month for overall access to Coursera or Udacity (probably just Coursera actually given the quality issues I've seen on Udacity). But the minute you try to shoehorn me back into the traditional mode of learning, I'm going back to reading books at my own pace and timing. Can we pretty please finally have the 21st century that should have started sometime during the last decade?
- aashaykumar92 13y ago
  That doesn't solve the problem of completing a course, though.

fernly 13y ago

Right. The people who create MOOCs are professors who think of what they are making as _courses_ with all the attendant assumptions (grades, exams, success as completion with certain scores). The people who consume the MOOCs treat them as they would _books_ -- to be picked up, sampled, read for the good parts, saved for future reference. The "courses" offered by MOOCs are in fact, _multimedia books_ with an optional social component. If they were viewed this way, a different business model might emerge.

mhurron 13y ago
> saved for future reference I wish that was possible with Coursera. I often need way more time then the structured course time. I don't interact with people on the forums so I don't care about that but locking me out of the videos means I don't get to see a lot of things I would like too.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  If you start a Coursera course and don't finish it, you usually have persistent access to the course videos.
  - AlexeyBrin 13y ago
    Not true for all courses (on Coursera), most of them will stop letting you access the videos after about 1 month from the course completion. However, you can download the videos once the course is finished.
    - waterlesscloud 13y ago
      It's definitely not my experience that "most" Coursera courses do this. Of my 12 completed classes, only one does not allow access to the videos. Some of these classes are 2 years old. The one that doesn't have the old videos sent out an email saying they were removing them when they re-ran the class with new videos a year later.
- 13y ago

timr 13y ago

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 protective bubble where the people who "want" education get to pretend that they're learning without actually doing much of anything. The self-delusion is so strong that people are denying what Thrun himself said: Udacity was (is?) a lousy product [1]. It doesn't do what it was supposed to do, which is educate more people for less money. The world doesn't need another way to spoon-feed infotainment to well-off people with good academic backgrounds (or at least, maybe the world wants that, but that isn't what Thrun wants, and I admire his integrity -- a lot of folks in his shoes would just be desperately trying to keep the party going, rather than admitting early failure). If MOOCs are nothing more than a place where half-interested techies go to pretend to learn about AI, then they're pretty useless. [1] http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education-revolution-drifts-off-course http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education...

michaelochurch 13y ago
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.

slowjoe 13y ago

+1 to the "high course join, low course completion" crowd. One thing that I did at work was establish a betting pool with two other co-workers on the Coursera C++ course that finished in December - completers would collect from non-completers. That is my one Coursera completion. I'm pretty sure that attaching betting pools to MOOC sites would make a major difference to completion rates for participants.

capnrefsmmat 13y ago

I don't see why MOOCs are pitched as revolutionary in teaching. They're still fundamentally lecture-based, and lectures are a terrible way to teach. I'm most familiar with research in physics education, where an average intro physics class fills only 24% of students' gaps in understanding. On the other hand, some professors are experimenting with more interactive methods -- not less interactive MOOCs -- and getting three times better results: http://www.refsmmat.com/articles/shutup.html http://www.refsmmat.com/articles/shutup.html

hershel 13y ago
Very interesting link. Thanks. Based on the conclusion of this link, it would be interesting to combine MOOC courses for the lecture part, with a technology like knewton, which by monitoring exercises you do , learn about what areas you have problems(and perhaps about misconceptions) , and can guide you to relevant content.
my_username_is_ 13y ago
Udacity, Thurin's MOOC platform, is interactive and was designed to not simply follow the lecture style of current classrooms
- saraid216 13y ago
  "Interactive" how? The quizzes? These have been a staple in current classrooms for a decades. Is there something else?

hojoff79 13y ago

I disagree that these are simply "books" and cannot supplement courses. There are many college students who simply attend lectures, turn in homework, ask a few questions and take their tests. MOOCs provide everything you need to have that experience virtually. I agree this model does not describe everyone, but I believe this is more an issue of motivation than resources. Going back to the comparison with textbooks, there are a good number of people who could teach themselves subjects purely out of textbooks if they were motivated. But even after mastering several subject in this way, your employment prospects and marketability are not significantly increased. Instead, people do their learning (online or in person) under the umbrella of a College, who can offer them "credit" / verification to the rest of the world, which in turn increases employment prospects and marketability. The MOOC product does not offer that benefit upon completion (they give you a certificate, but right now it is not respected at all and therefore does not give the desired effect), so only those interested in the intellectual knowledge have motivation to complete the MOOC courses (not surprisingly, a very low number of people). But I think if they give it more time they / the market could develop products that provide value for completion of these courses. Maybe some sort of independent service that tests and certifies completing students (i.e. what College Board has done for high school courses with the AP program). They could even track combinations of courses students complete to ensure a rounded knowledge of a subject area. That is just one idea off the top of my head, but the point remains that this is an economic issue of motivation and benefits for completion, not an issues of resources.

xiaoma 13y ago
>"Going back to the comparison with textbooks, there are a good number of people who could teach themselves subjects purely out of textbooks if they were motivated. But even after mastering several subject in this way, your employment prospects and marketability are not significantly increased." I intend to put that assumption to the test. I suspect that once GRE subject tests start falling, both my prospects and marketability will jump dramatically.

johngalt 13y ago

While I like the idea of making courses as independent as possible, some kind of suggested course track might help completion rates. I passed the original ai-class on schedule with distinction. Then when Udacity started I zipped through intro to CS as a review. When I took Norvig's 'Design of computer programs', it was a kick in the teeth. I knew pretty quick that I wasn't going to finish on schedule, then that I wasn't going to finish at all.

xiaoma 13y ago

I put about 20 hours a week of my time over the past 6 months or so into MOOCs, primarily on Coursera. I've also used Khan Academy, edX, and some non-MOOC materials like Code School in the past. I've definitely learned some great things, but it hasn't actually been the most efficient use of time. Rather than write a mini blog post here, I'll link to the actual blog post I recently wrote on it: http://logicmason.com/2013/self-directed-programming-and-computer-science-study-through-moocs/ http://logicmason.com/2013/self-directed-programming-and-com... To summarize the problems, the pre-requisites aren't always clear and are sometimes incomplete, the courses don't generally offer enough work that students can get help on, and set-up for the computing classes is often a huge pain. Finally, for me personally, the set pace is a serious detriment. I do much better if I can get the materials all at once and do 25% or more of a course in a weekend.

djs1sjd 13y ago

As others have noted, these MOOCs work great for people who already have a solid foundation in the skills of learning, whether they are highly-driven and parentally-supported high school students, college degree holders, or people who are equivalently self-taught. If you don't fall into one of the above categories, it is _very_ difficult to overcome the practical, and motivational challenges that stand in the way of success in these classes. Examples: a poor inner-city kid with serious challenges at home and at school, an out of work high-school/college drop-out who is years out of any sort of academic setting. At least in the US, the disadvantaged side of educational inequality spectrum is defined by these types of of people. Without a great deal of in-person support (whether by government via schools, their communities, or their families), it is unlikely that such people will be able to increase their education, MOOCs or otherwise. EDIT: added some clarifying wording.

varelse 13y ago

I enjoyed the Udacity AI course, but I was repeatedly frustrated by the many errors that were never corrected and especially Peter Norvig's nails on blackboard scribbling sounds with his felt tip. Am I the only one who could hear this? Overall, I think there was a real lack of attention to detail after an excellent job on getting the big picture right. That said, MOOCs have revolutionized my ability to keep up with technology trends and I spend 1-2 hours daily on Coursera and Udacity. I do not care whatsoever about certificates or completing courses. I just care about raw knowledge acquisition and reviewing previously learned material (i.e. refreshing my calculus, statistics, algorithms, and linear algebra skills). I personally think the future of this business will involve celebrity teachers like Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun putting together more polished versions of their courses and then allowing a cottage industry to grow around tutoring people through them at their own pace rather than shoehorning a freestyle approach to learning into effective semesters and quarters. If this is infotainment, it sure beats the likes of Fox News and MSNBC.

saraid216 13y ago
> I personally think the future of this business will involve celebrity teachers like Andrew Ng and Sebastian Thrun putting together more polished versions of their courses and then allowing a cottage industry to grow around tutoring people through them at their own pace rather than shoehorning a freestyle approach to learning into effective semesters and quarters. This is actually fairly similar to my own classroom designs, so I wanted to call it out for emphasis.

mcguire 13y ago

I think the point here is that if the goal is to provide at least some information (and entertainment, which is not worthless) to at least some of the numbers of students that sign up, then Udacity specifically and MOOCs in general are successful. On the other hand, if the goal is to provide an education that is as solid and as valued as a university, which Thrun seems to think his goal was, then Udacity and MOOCs are not succeeding. Further, if Udacity, which is a company that needs to make a profit, is going to succeed then it needs to change its focus.

nicholas73 13y ago

Another thing that lowers course completion rates, unmentioned yet, is that most of Udacity's classes are on the challenging side of college courses. They are mostly STEM classes and many equivalent to upper division courses as well. So it isn't surprising the NPR article reports only the most studious SJSU students benefited. The vast majority of SJSU students, and students from other colleges as well, would find these courses challenging also, with or without in-person support. I don't think that's an insurmountable problem, with the course notes being better designed and readily available (as compared to a disinterested professor + textbook). On the other side, many students don't bother talking to their professors and TAs anyway.

bakul 13y ago

May be they need to incentivize people differently: charge money to sign up for a course. If you finish it, you get it all back (or a certificate - your pick! If you are in the top 10% of the completers, you get a degree as well as your money). If you get through 75%, you get half back. If you get through 50% you get 25% back.

joyofdata 13y ago

I took and take several classes, so far on coursera and edX - and I love it. Taped lectures with quizzes, weekly assignments, exam and maybe even a peer-rated project are definitely a great way to learn something! My goal always is to finish with a certificate because this gives me an idea on how well I am doing. As a matter of fact I do not like Udacity very much. It is too playful and too unorganized compared to a lot of courses on coursera and pretty much all courses on edX. Udacity tries too hard to educate everybody by being very friendly at all times - this either leads to courses which start out all bubbly and funny and all of a sudden turn complex too suddenly - or courses that stay on that trivial level. MOOC is awesome but what Thrun apparently doesn't get is that this concept still requires dedication and disciplin from the student. And you can design your class whatever way you like - either the student has it or s/he doesn't. Also he is comparing apples and pears with his ratio #succesfull/#registered. #registered of course is a marketing driven KPI and sould be as high as possible, so every time somebody clicks "Learn free" it is counted. But you have to "register" to just figure out what the course really is about and whether it is worth taking! Also he is a business man and by switching to the new course format it is much easier for Udacity to monetarize - what a surprise. Opposed to edX and coursera, Udacity is kind of a one-man-show and he is maybe too ambitious and lacks patience (see biking with somebody else). An article on my experience: http://www.joyofdata.de/blog/social-network-analysis-lada-adamic-coursera/ http://www.joyofdata.de/blog/social-network-analysis-lada-ad...

joyofdata 13y ago

Udacity does not equal MOOC - It is just one platform offering online courses and it is inferior in quality and conception to most courses on edx.org and coursera.org. Thrun has a big ego and thinks because he didn't succeed with HIS goals - then the concept of interactive and gradid online learning is doomed. No matter how smart he might be - but that is simply stupid.

russelluresti 13y ago

Thrun's new objective - to give industry a voice in the education process, is a valid objective. Most of the research shows that what people learn in school only contributes in a minor way to what they do - they learn most of what they need to know on-the-job. Udacity's new direction will allow companies to help potential prospects acquire those skills beforehand, in this general education-augmented way. It's not a bad idea, and it's definitely something that was needed. However, it is sad to see one of the most vocal people toss aside the original goal of providing education to the under-priveleged to help them escape poverty. Just saying that poor people have a different set of challenges that make online classes a "poor fit" for them is the easy way out. It's also sad to hear him say that the true value proposition of education is employment. The notion that education and employment are hand-in-hand related is the thing that holds back the education system the most. Education is about allowing people to move forward - advancing culture, science, technology, etc. so that we're not all stuck plowing fields with oxen. While capitalism ties these advancements to employment and profit, the connection is based entirely on how things are done now, and not how things could or should be done (or even how they were done in the past).

jero25 13y ago

http://www.freeitonlinecourses.com/free-online-courses-with-certificate/ http://www.freeitonlinecourses.com/free-online-courses-with-... For free online courses with certificate have a look at the above link

Executor 13y ago

I have been using online courses for a while, here is my pitch: Most online courses are still under the old mindset of the conservative education model. Why does a course have a start and end date? I learn on my OWN time since I'm constrained by full-time employment. Why does a course have tests/exams? I came here to learn not obtain a badge, degree, or a set of meaningless numbers/grades. Why does a course NOT have a programming/application-centric method of learning? Why does an online course not have GREAT material and resources (i.e. lackluster application tests, labs, programming projects)? All these block me from doing what I want when I join an online course - to learn.