Slashdot Mirror
What Professors Can Learn From "Hard Core" MOOC Students
jyosim writes "Hundreds of people are spending 20 or 30 hours a week just taking free Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. They're not looking for credit, just the challenge of learning. This Chronicle of Higher Ed story looks at whether these MOOC addicts think they're learning as much as they would in a traditional college course. From the article: 'Consider Anna Nachesa, a 42-year-old single mother in a village near Amsterdam who logs on to MOOCs for several hours each night after dinner with her teenage kids. She has always found TV boring, she says, and for her, MOOCs replace reading books. She is a physicist by training, with a degree from Moscow State University, and she works as a software developer.
"This stuff is actually addictive," she says. In some ways the lure is like Everest: Some want to climb it to see if they can. "The Dutch have the proverb 'If you never shoot, you already missed,'" she says.'"
"'If you want to become an expert in the field,' he says, 'I think you need the book.'" My first assignment in my current PhD program was to come up with a list of errata from the textbook to submit back to the collegue of the instructor to fix for the next edition. It was one of the most informative assignments of my entire academic career.
So out of 3 million people signed up with Coursera, only 900 have completed 10 or more courses, comparable to roughly a year of full-time schooling. Only 100 have completed 20 or more. That's a 99.97% dropout rate after one year.
This isn't going to replace other forms of education with stats like that.
to teach a niche or particular subject they find incredibly interesting and the university may not sign off on it. For example I took and Algorithms course, and a cryptography course. Both applicable to the CompSci field and degree programs but not really incorporated in the bulk of programs offered.