Millions of people begin online courses, but very few actually finish them. I suspect that’s because most students are not motivated to impress a computer the way they may be motivated to impress a human professor. Managers who can motivate supreme effort in a machine-dominated environment are going to be valuable.
Actually, I think that a big reason that people drop online courses is that those courses are a misfit for them. An advantage of a typical live course is that most of the students have been selected to have similar abilities and experiences. A lot of people sign up for online courses who otherwise would be discouraged from doing so. That is not necessarily a problem with online learning.
However, that is why MOOCs are not the answer, in my view. My line is that we need instruction that is many-to-one, not one-to-many. Indeed, Jonathan Haber suggests that MOOCs might be a step backward, and he links to something I wrote in 2002.
suppose that we had all of the highly-touted electronic technologies for distance learning, and then someone came along and invented the book. My guess is that the book would be greeted as a technological marvel–easy to hold, convenient to carry, outstanding resolution, and so forth. This thought experiment leads me to suspect that electronic distance learning is a fad.
On the subject of the future, my joke is that the ideal occupation will be a yoga instructor working in an old-age home. That lines up with the trends toward more spending on health care, education, and leisure, along with an older demographic.
The big difference between education via a traditional brick and mortar college and via a MOOC is that with the MOOC there’s no value in the credential, only in what you learn.
That combined with the very low barriers of entry mean low completion rates are going to be inevitable, but not necessarily a sign of anything going wrong.
Like you I don’t think MOOC’s are the answer, but they are useful for providing structured information at very low cost.
I’d use myself as a data point. I’ve probably signed up for about 7 or 8 MOOC’s and completed only half of them. My learning was very fragmented, but they’ve allowed me to self-teach myself html and css, some javascript and python, and a little bit of economics and data scrubbing, all for a total cost of $250, which is less than the tuition of a community college.
Decent results, very low cost.
And to tack on to my last comment, I think the real problem with MOOC’s isn’t their low completion rates, but the lack a credential that follows you around to accurately track all that you learn.
College degrees are a very inefficient signal in this regard. Reid Hoffman has written about this, and he talks about the need for some sort of protocol which can be used to collect data about everything you learn that can be compiled to let others know what you’re competent in. This could be anything from message boards you frequent to MOOC’s you take (but not necessarily finish), and even things that happen offline as long as you log them correctly.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114692/college-diploma-time-upgrade
I think he’s on to something.