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How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing? If someone finishes the class, aces the exam, and then promptly goes on living their life as an IT professional without any tangible change, was the course anything more than "infotainment"?

I'm not sure how you measure "real" learning, but course completion doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

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If you stop reading a book after 20% or 50% or 90%, have you wasted your time? Possibly not, but you haven't read the book, either.

A well-designed course isn't a random bag of stuff. It has a starting point and an ending point, and skipping out before the end can certainly be regarded as a failure, at least by the instructor.

> How do you measure educational value? If someone finishes 90% of the class but never takes the final exam, have they learned nothing?

Here's the thing: you can't tell.

Why is there a final exam? Because otherwise, you can't tell. It's an exit survey.

This is one of the clearest indicators that Udacity and other MOOCs aren't actually "revolutionizing" anything in education; they're just making an economic gamble on an iteration.

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