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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

"The Achilles heel of the MOOC phenomena has been that while enrollments have been huge, the number of students who actually complete courses for credit has remained low."

Of course completion is low, there is no cost to signing up so many people will do it on a whim.

The real Achilles heal is certification, for it to be valued employers need to be convinced you aren't cheating and that the assessment is rigorous.

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Also, I don't care about the entire course. I want the specific information that is relevant to my problem at hand. I'll be the judge of which lectures satisfy what I need.

I find it a shame that MOOCs these days are trying to duplicate the brick and mortar experience, because they really could be offering so much more.

I signed up for the course in question - I think it was my first interaction with a MOOC - and lost interest very quickly. Realistically, I need the abbreviated version rather than the intro videos and the opportunity to meet classmates and so on.

Does a MOOC have an interest in creating longer courses that seem like they're worthy of certification, rather than just teaching people quickly and effectively?

I signed up for a ton of courses and dropped the majority. For me, the quality simply wasn't there. I have no way of objectively verifying this claim, but imho if the quality was there completion rates would be much higher. As is the majority of these courses just aren't worth the time.

I avoid MOOCs lately as they are often too slow paced, or lacking in specific and/or advanced material and instead find a university with a public accessible calendar and cherry pick what I'm interested from there. For example this excellent course from CMU on the internals of modern database management systems. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjbisIGOepfn...

> The real Achilles heal is certification, for it to be valued employers need to be convinced you aren't cheating and that the assessment is rigorous.

I really don't think this is it either, because you have to be naive to think there isn't massive cheating that goes on in traditional universities. I would venture to guess that cheating is perhaps lower currently with the students who complete MOOC's because the fact that there is no current incentive to do so. Also it's not that it isn't rigorous either -- at least for some of the EdX courses they are almost 1:1 translations of the OpenCourseWare versions, which themselves are just the actual classes they teach at MIT.

A majority of the people simply don't like to learn anyways, even if they try. Even if there's a perfect MOOC out there most students don't complete the course because most people simply aren't students, or they're not cut out to be students. So the failure rate may not be the fault of MOOCs, but simply how many people in society work.

With that said I do believe that they should be valued and have a lot more credibility.

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