Why? Drawing from my experience learning some technical material, I will give some candidate answers: (1) Content. From what I've seen of MOOCs in some area

Why? Drawing from my experience learning some technical material, I will give some candidate answers: (1) Content. From what I've seen of MOOCs in some areas where I know some things, usually the content looks poor just on the subject itself and/or its presentation, i.e., too many of the lectures are just poorly done in any common sense of good lectures. E.g., start in the upper, left corner of the board and write clearly, clearly enough so that a student can take essentially perfect notes. (2) Purpose. Commonly the courses do not have a sufficiently clear and meaningful purpose for enough candidate students. E.g., why study calculus? What MOOCs provide a really clear answer meaningful even to most of the people who consider a course in calculus? E.g., why'd I study calculus? In., in grades 1-8 I got dumped on by the teachers; those teachers wanted to teach to the girls with their better handwriting, better verbal talent and skills, better clerical talent, better insight into fictional literature, and much better classroom decorum. I wanted, strongly beyond belief, to know how things worked, and the girls were little masters at knowing how the teachers worked! In grade 9 I discovered I could do math, i.e., algebra and fairly easily could lead the class. Essentially all the girls in the class, all of whom had effortlessly blown me away in grades 1-8 now were struggling while I was having a great time, easily. I got sent to a math tournament. That success continued in grades 10-12. In the 11th grade, I saw the same for physics -- could usually have my head down in class, resting, and still be one of the best students in the class -- of mostly 12th graders, three of whom went to Princeton and ran against each other and some fourth sucker for President of the freshman class. I got sent to an NSF math and physics summer program. So, in college, I was hot to go in math and quickly went through the course catalog and planned all the math courses I would have for all four years. I really liked math! But to save money, I did my freshman college year at a state school, inexpensive, I could walk to. They forced me into a course in college algebra beneath what I'd already done in high school (by far the best in the city, e.g., the three guys who went to Princeton; MIT came recruiting; a guy I beat in a shootout at the board in trig class went to MIT). A girl told me when the tests were, and I showed up only for those. But, I knew that as a freshman I was supposed to be learning calculus and was torqued that I was not. So I got the recommended calculus book and dug in. In grades 9-12 I'd learned mostly just from the book so also was able to do well working through the calculus book, totally independently. I did well: E.g., I had quite nice college board scores, especially in math and physics, so, the next year (we had a little more money) I got into a good four year college. So, where to start there in math? Okay, I asked to start with just their sophomore calculus. They said that they couldn't give me credit for first year calculus, but that was totally fine with me. The text they used was the same as Harvard used; it was good. I did fine -- made As, loved the material, had fun, didn't work at it very hard. Right: I was a math major but never really took a course in freshman calculus! Also blew away everyone in their freshman physics course -- first test had four questions; I got all four; no other student got more than two; tree counted as 100; so I got 133; and I never missed anything for the rest of the semester so ended up with 33 points over a perfect score. The second semester, missed only one test question. Went on and got honors in math, got a Ph.D. in applied math (stochastic optimal control), have had math much of my career, and now have some original math I derived as the crucial core technology for my search engine start up. Lesson: I've had a purpose in mind learning math. So, I did learn calculus, just on my own for freshman calculus. So, why? Sure: (a) Motivation. I really, really, really wanted to know the material, not just a little bit but a lot. (b) Resources. I had plenty of time to do the work. (c) Preparation. The four years of math I took in high school gave me about everything one could want in prerequisites for calculus. (d) While I didn't know much about just what I would do with calculus or math after college, I did believe that they should help my career, and I knew that, for math, calculus was one of the biggies. Okay, for the MOOCs, if have (a)-(d) and some good materials, then lots of students should do well. If are not having many students are doing well, then look first at (a)-(d) and the materials. From what I've seen, too commonly the course materials are not very good. E.g., for calculus, from what I've seen, it appears that the courses want to imply the a person can learn calculus easily as a spectator (sport) watching videos instead of doing the work studying good materials, say, a good text. I doubt that many students could learn calculus as a spectator sport. There really can be opportunities for people to learn outside a classroom, and online materials can help. But need good materials, likely including a good, traditional text book, and also need, say, (a)-(d) above. By the way, as a math grad student, I taught calculus successfully. As an MBA prof, I taught more in applied math successfully. In my career, I continued to learn on my own: E.g., for some weeks I carried Blackman and Tukey, The Measurement of Power Spectra to dinner at a seafood bar in Silver Spring, MD, and then one week, mostly on my own without my company knowing about it, wrote some corresponding software which was a big help in our company winning a competitive software development contract -- my work on power spectra estimation had in effect given our company sole source. Lesson 1: Math can make money. Lesson 2: It is possible to do the work of math making money mostly via independent study. Lesson 3: I doubt that any of the MOOCs will cover how to measure power spectra, say, with the fast Fourier transform (FFT)! How about a continuous time, discrete state space Markov process subordinated to a Poisson process? Make money with that? Did that once. Covered well in a MOOC? I doubt it! I used to look at MOOCs, wanted to learn more about, say, stochastic processes in continuous time, say, like in Gihman and Skorohod or Lipster and Shiryayev or Karatzas and Shreve. Gee, I didn't find much! There is high irony here: This is Hacker News, and my view is that nearly all the learning crucial for the current US information technology industry, especially the software part of it, has been from essentially just independent study. So, the irony is that the readers of Hacker News should be about the best audience for MOOCs. E.g., for a while in my career, when I was fairly deep into computing but before I'd ever had a course in computing or computer science, I taught several sections of computer science at Georgetown University. Later in grad school, I was pushed to take a course in computer science -- not much past what I'd taught at Georgetown! At one point, sure, the course tried to cover quicksort. Okay, worthwhile for such a course! But I'd long since learned quicksort, heap sort, Shell sort, bubble sort, merge sort, etc. from some original papers and Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, programmed all those that were in-place sort algorithms, compared their performance, programmed some special purpose versions, etc. So, during the course, I just watched and smiled. Gee, they neglected to mention that in the bit reversed permutation from some of the versions of the fast Fourier transform, Shell sort does nothing at all until the last pass at which time it runs in O(N^2)! Gee, why didn't they mention that one! Lesson: It's possible to do well in computing and computer science with independent study. Surprise: One of the profs in that course didn't like me and gave me a grade of C. I appealed to the department, pointed to some code I'd submitted in my application to the department, the code I'd written to schedule the fleet at FedEx, the code I'd written for power spectral estimation, etc., and the next year that prof was gone! Lesson: If the Hacker News audience is not doing well with MOOCs, then blame the MOOCs, not the students!