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intended

Education has been disrupted.

The disruption taught us that education is more than what we think of when we imagine the word studying.

Khan Academy exists, and has existed for a while.

The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.

Online education was/is the holy grail of 2000 era layman ideas of education.

Free, world class, available at your finger tips, at any time, educational content.

Yet We know that with this world class information and self selected motivated students (!!) only a tiny fraction of the class will finish.

In contrast, most people who get in, finish college.

In person education beats online education hollow.

Matter of fact even the work from home enthusiasm will wane and return to office work.

There are too many things people do by being in proximity to each other which may have nothing to do with the “mission”, but make the mission possible.

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I went from lurking on HN to joining during the "MOOC rush" exactly because people did not seem to get that for the broad student population, online is nowhere near as useful as in person. While there are some percentage of people who have the motivation and skills to get out of online systems everything they would get out of in-class, the percentage is small.

For example, when I am teaching a class, it is a dynamic process. I am responding to people's questions, they are responding to my response, etc. Most of that goes away online. There are some attempts to recreate it, but most students just do not find it is the same.

You put your finger on it exactly: "most people who get in, finish."

But that doesn't address the article. I am not a lawyer, but the suit seems foolish to me. Colleges were ordered to close. That seems relevant to me.

Yes, this doesn't address the article.

Conversations here usually shift from the article to some variant of "disrupt education" and college is signalling.

I find Bloom's 2 Sigma problem to be illustrative of the extent to which online learning is a loss to students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

Studying in person has significantly different results.

The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.

Yes, colleges were mostly told to close although some were closing at least for undergraduates before the orders came down.

>The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.

I'm sympathetic. The students aren't getting what they paid for. It's no one in particular's fault, but the service being paid for is being delivered in degraded form. I'm not sure you can even argue that, in general, the students will still get credit for this semester's courses because some classes probably can't be completed and, for a variety of reasons, many students will probably lose part of this semester and end up tacking on time to their degree as a result.

>The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.

As a counter point to this, roughly 1/2 of med students attend class in person never or rarely. They use online resources because they think it's more efficient. They still pay the 50k a year for med school because they need the credential and it's the gateway for the clinical instruction in years 3/4 that has to be done in person.

The problem with the MOOC model is that it doesn't serve as a credential that people trust

> In contrast, most people who get in, finish college. > In person education beats online education hollow.

This isn't really true.

"According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just 41% of first-time full-time college students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, and only 59% earn a bachelor’s in six years."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/19/just-41percent-of-college-st...

As you yourself point out, 59% finish in 6 years.

In contrast, these are MOOC completion rates:

>Among all MOOC participants, 3.13 percent completed their courses in 2017-18, down from about 4 percent the two previous years and nearly 6 percent in 2014-15.

www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/16/study-offers-data-show-moocs-didnt-achieve-their-goals

They add:

>Certainly 55,000 people got access to education they might not otherwise have had. But "rather than creating new pathways at the margins of global higher education," the authors write, "MOOCs are primarily a complementary asset for learners within existing systems."

They do allude to a construct called "Verfied Students" which I have no idea about, which have higher but significantly varying completion rates.

> And among the "verified" students, 46 percent completed in 2017-18, compared to 56 percent in 2016-17 and about 50 percent the two previous years.

I have never encountered how that cohort was constructed, however if we are to start breaking down sub groups of students from general numbers, your data shows that non-profit and public institutions have near 60% graduation rates at 6 years.

In general a random student will more will likely graduate from a college, than a random person starting a MOOC.

I view a MOOC as similar to a well funded public library. A fantastic tool for entertainment, current students, and professionals looking for very specific things. But it’s not a replacement for guided education.

It’s not really a meaningful comparison though - MOOCs have a lower (zero) barrier to entry, and a lower (zero) price of dropping. College is expensive, requires admission, and confers actual credit/degrees.

>The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.

I don't think I've ever completed a MOOC. When I get what I want out of it I drop it. Now if I was paying for it or if completion was a requirement for a job or promotion I think I'd be more invested in completing the course.

True, and this one reason among many why MOOC Retention rates are at 3%.

This is one of the reasons that online education will fall behind real world college classes.

Another is whether people learn the same amount.

The lack of structure and pressure is also a thing. In a traditional class you must show up or miss out. MOOCs are available at all times forever, which means you can watch them “someday”, which is usually the same as “never”.

Honestly I'd rather have the MOOCs there so I can access them as though they were a library. You get more context than on Stackoverflow but you don't have to commit to several classes or find out early on that you picked the wrong course.

Most people who get in don't indeed finish college.

"The official four-year graduation rate for students attending public colleges and universities is 33.3%. The six-year rate is 57.6%."

Most MOOCs have poor retention because there's no commitment. There's no reason to continue to apply oneself.

I've had a great deal of success with Coursera and a small in-person study group to keep us committed.

I spent 4 hours yesterday on Kahn Academy remembering my calculus so I could help my daughter.

MOOCs are invaluable resources, but those alone are insufficient. Support and study groups are an important adjunct.

*: https://www.cappex.com/articles/blog/government-publishes-gr...

In retrospect, the idea that MOOCs could come anywhere close to replacing colleges was folly. While not universally available, the tools for self education have been available for a long time in major metropolitan areas, and we know that serious self education there is a relatively rare thing.

Maybe VR will change things?

VR is still not R. At some point you want to recreate body language, relative positioning, and you want the interface to get away from intruding on the experience.

The whole point of things like technology is to make things easier, keyboards and mice make it possible to manipulate tools to increase the amount of actions we can execute by using programmed automation (for example).

VR just makes doing that more expensive.

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