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Comment by gamesbrainiac | Hacker News Reader

I think this emphasis on completion rates are a problem. I take a lot of MOOCs, but not all the content in said MOOCs are important. I just watch the parts of courses that are important or relevant to what I am doing, and call it a day.

For people learning from non-conventional sources, they are used to using bits and pieces from different online sources and building up their own courses and their own paths.

This fascination with completion rates is simply our propensity to value what we measure instead of measuring what we value.

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Very much this. I think a large issue with MOOCs is that they're too focused on emulating the structure of a university class - focus on lectures, community built around specific classes, focusing on the metric of course completion rather than on attaining skills, etc. People who successfully teach themselves things (and right now, there are many people using the internet to teach themselves things) often have a very different approach.

It's interesting that so many people have trouble even considering that there might be other ways to approach education.

People who "successfully" teach themselves are overrated (good examples being Trump or Zuckerberg). They might be successful in a few dimensions (purely out of self discipline and above avg energy levels) but totally miseducated in many others because people don't know what they don't know. Without the right guides, feedback processes, environment and time(lots of time) most people usually end up taking all kinds of wrong turns.

Education not something intuitive, even if there are many paths. If it was we would just be leaving kids in libraries.

Your point that self-education often tends toward narrowness is well-taken, but I strongly disagree with the implication that any significant number of autodidacts are overrated in the way that your two examples are.

The rate of 12 years old kids who can barely read suggest that current school systems don't work too well either, so what do you suggest?

Trump graduated University, so how are you defining self educated?

Zuckerberg received an honorary degree, which suggests the University approved of what he learnt.

If you're pointing at education as the cause of the problem for these 2, structured education bears at least some of the blame because it should have been teaching the tools for further learning.

I think the Microsoft edx moocs have solved this problem pretty well. They are typically focused on a more narrow topic, they are shorter (usually around a month), and they are very explicit on the weekly time required and this actually matches.

I've used msft edx to learn bootstrap and their azure machine learning platform and they were there best moocs I've ever taken.

I think the problem here is the framing of the headline.

Considering MOOC signups are completely free, a percentage alone tells you nothing. 4% of 100 signups would be appalling. 4% of 60,000 signups is still thousands of people successfully completing courses, and is actually a success story.

I was recently watching some courses on AWS, I passed the actual exam but I only watched a few videos where things were a bit ambiguous for me. So the completion metric is not very useful or accurate IMO.

I too have signed up to a mooc, simply to watch a particular lecture or two on a topic - as recommended by colleagues or friends. No intention of completing the course, and in fact very happy with the content.

Perhaps they need a box on the signup or viewing form, to indicate "just checking it out to see if I'm interested", or "just here to watch part of the course".

Here in Australia, when students finish high school and enter university it is common to hear them given the advice that it is "okay to change" after a year of your course. Get a feel for it, decide if it is actually for you, calibrate against the teaching/learning style, measure the enjoyment vs effort etc. I imagine MOOCs are starkly in contrast (provide an email address) to the complexity of signing up for a university degree.

Who knows, maybe students even form opinions by partially completing MOOCs in topics they might want to study at a tertiary institution!

How about making all the content viewable without signing up for the class instead of a checkbox.

Yep, exactly this. I'll also add that there are just a lot more signups. If I sign up for 20 courses and only really engage with 1...that's still one more course than I would have gotten to learn from otherwise. Certainly my eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to learning in many cases, but that doesn't mean that great value is not being had.

You hit the nail on the head and I'm going to shamelessly steal the last sentence because it's a great turn of phrase.

Imagine you ran a class with 90% casual users wherein 80% of serious users finished and 10% of casuals. Out of 1000 users 170 would finish or 17%.

Charging increasing amounts of money would drive away increasingly large number of casual users while increasing completion rates.

By the time you get rid of all your casual users you will have an 80% competition rate while halving the number of people who take the class to completion and decreasing the number who learn something by 90%.

Maybe we can measure the relative preparation of incoming students who participated in moocs vs those who did not to better understand how much people benefit?

I have done research on moocs. I think this article is a relic of it's time (2014). While some people are still focused on completion rates, I think many researchers have moved on to instead focus on other topics.

What are the current metrics?

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