We grappled with rates when I was engineering manager for the team at Coursera that created course statistics for our partners.

The completion “rate” does not matter because the denominator is a very noisy signal. It’s a count of enrollments and what does “enrollment” signal in an online course, when it takes two clicks from a tweet.

There are other complexities but completion rate in the “are MOOCs worth offering” question is silly and tired.

What matters is people getting value they otherwise wouldn’t.