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San Jose State Suspends Collaboration With Udacity
New submitter ulatekh writes "San Jose State University is suspending a highly touted collaboration with online provider Udacity to offer low-cost, for-credit online courses after finding that more than half of the students failed to pass the classes. 'Preliminary results from a spring pilot project found student pass rates of 20% to 44% in remedial math, college-level algebra and elementary statistics courses. In a somewhat more promising outcome, 83% of students completed the classes.'"
Reading between the lines, my guess is that many students thought an online course "inferior" to regular classes, and therefore okay to slack off when doing. Time, however, or time management, may be more the enemy than actual course matter.
I know a high school student who takes online school courses, and one of the ongoing problems for the parents is getting the student to understand that there are X modules to do and only Y days to do them in. Dividing X by Y means that every two or three days something must be completed and sent in for marking. If this requirement is difficult for a high school student to follow without parental hectoring, then it is entirely understandable that kids only a couple years older, who no longer have their parents to help keep them on track, are going to run into problems.
Online courses are the collegiate equivalent of independent study programs. Independent study programs are definitely not for everyone.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
You can lead a student to learning, but you can't make them think.... or do the homework.
It's not that simple... the story is that getting students into class, etc... i.e. the more traditional educational approaches, leads to more students doing the work required to learn something.
I often see people bashing about how universities are expensive, and we should all drop out and just follow online courses... i.e. Learn it on our own...
But this clearly shows that showing up for class, discussion with others and having supervisors expecting things from you is very important.
Obviously, it should come as no surprise that educating your self, versus showing up for class, that ladder options is easiest and, thus, most likely to succeed.
Luckily, I'm from a country where education is free... In fact, my living expenses were more or less covered, during the 5 years I just spend taking an MSc in CS.