Thankfully, we have a data analytics team now (3 out of our 17 engineers), and they are studying our retention statistics and the factors that affect it. They're also running A/B experiments to see what increases it and getting some interesting results.

We do see some big advantages of the timed model for learning, particularly in classes with peer-to-peer grading and evaluations, but there's obviously a big desire for the self-study mode, which is enabled for a few of our classes currently.

We're also introducing things like Signature Track, which some students sign up for just to encourage themselves to make it to the end (and it seems to work for many of them).

We'll keep experimenting to see what makes students both happy and successful. :-)

I have feedback for you as regards retention of students.

The number one thing is due dates and late penalties. If I sign up for a course and work through the first few weeks and get everything done, and then I miss a deadline because life happens, suddenly I am no longer able to get a 100% in the class. I do not mind getting an A- in a class if it happens naturally because the material is difficult, but losing my A+ or A because I am 12 hours late on an assignment ruins the experience for me. I usually drop a class when this happens and wait for it to come around again.

A counter-example to prove the rule: Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms course. The last time he gave it, he had late penalties and I only had time to get through the first two weeks of the class without getting behind. This time around, there were no late penalties. Being enormously busy with other things, I was not able to keep up with the class as it went along. However, because I lost no credit for doing things late, I was able to complete the entire class in the final 10 days of course and I got an A. I have no problem staying up all night to finish interesting programming assignments and quizzes, but I need to be allowed to do this on my schedule.

I strongly encourage you to encourage your professors to do away with late penalties. It should be up to us as students to determine what our work schedule is. I know for some courses, those that use peer-evaluation, this is impossible, but many more could take this route than currently do.

I agree that Signature Track does have the effect of encouraging one to keep up with the class.

On the other side of the coin though people are relying on the strictness of handin times in order to motivate them to get through the course in a reasonable amount of time.

Timed based on a final date to finish everything is a compromise but wouldn't work for everyone, as some would loose motivation after falling too far behind. So maybe there needs to be a few deadlines throughout the course, but not a weekly one.

The only course I have done I ended up missing a week handin as well, I think most working people would be in the same boat.

I love the fact that there is a due date, it forces me to do it and a certificate is very rewarding too (I tend to give up the courses that give me no "credits")...

I think in general,the schedule are too tight though.

So successfully completion of the course won't require watching the videos.

I do hope that you will open up most (if not all) of your courses for self-study mode. There are a few courses I really wanted to take, but due to the lack of time I really couldn't commit myself at the time they opened (I wanted to do them in the summer instead!).

I also think this guy makes valid points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5469909

For me, the pace of the course is actually a plus. If there were no deadline, I simply would not get around to doing it. I remember when I first found all the MIT courses on-line (several years ago). I really wanted to take some of them, but because there was no schedule and no deadline, I never got around to taking any of them. It's only with Coursera that I have actually taken (and finished) any.

I've written about my experience of all three courses on my blog. The latest was Algorithms: Design and Analysis, part 2 http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course...

As for courses being too fast: they're college courses. That's a core part of their value proposition. If they were slower, or did not follow a rigid schedule at all (like the "better" examples presented in the article), they would be a fundamentally different product. The author simply doesn't understand the concept behind MOOCs, and probably isn't their intended audience. He would be better served watching lectures on Youtube (I don't mean that sarcastically, there are fantastic courses available there).

Synchronous learning is not, as another poster claims, an anachronism. It simply isn't necessary or valuable for everyone. For some, myself included, it is a significant benefit. That is the market that Coursera and edX are targeting, and one shouldn't criticize a company simply because one isn't a member of their target market.

You're mistaken, actually - in most cases, coursera does not offer taking classes off schedule for no certificate. That's exactly what everyone is asking for.

The only thing I'd like is the more intense 6 week courses split over say 10 weeks. Other than that I think they are taking the right approach.

Unfortunately my free time isn't available in nice predetermined six-week chunks, but even if I am able to catch up three weeks or more in a weekend the courses gave a very negative vibe about continuing to progress as soon as you miss a single one of their deadlines (i.e.- "you missed our deadline for this multiple-choice computer marked test, so your effort no longer counts"). I've 'failed' several coursera sessions in the fourth or fifth week for that reason.

Timetabling seems a very traditional educational view, and it contrasted sharply with codecademy and sites like duolingo where I spent Jan and Feb learning the basics of new languages - computer and human. I finished the courses I took because I did them at my own pace.

I think the majority of MOOC course developers want to run their online courses as closely to their university versions as possible, since that's what they're used to working with. It also provides a handy way for them to go off-duty, in a sense, if the course has a finite end date. Using their current pacing structure (which is incredibly difficult, as the OP points out, for people that aren't full-time students) allows the teachers to do something other than devote themselves solely to the course, assuming they don't want to just post an archive and leave it alone -- which would meet a lot of people's needs, but misses the whole teacher-student interaction, which is pretty much missing from MOOCs anyway. If they want to provide an environment that's like a classroom, with students interacting with the instructors and with each other, you kind of need everybody at the same pace. It would be nice for us if they could slow that pace down, but that would probably increase the workload for the instructors.

We're still early in this game. I'm glad that so many professors have been willing to invest the time into developing the courses, and I understand why they are currently set up to be conveniently structured for them. I think we'll start to see some improvements if/when the money appears in the MOOC game. Once it's no longer basically charity work for the instructors, there will probably be more efforts to work around student schedules.

In addition to having a normal job, I'm a traditional university student, so any of the online classes I take are simply out of interest in the subject. I dip into the class when I have time, almost like a leisure activity. I just don't currently have the time to fit in more strict course work on top of my already over loaded class schedule and work week.

These completion rates are actually more like conversion rates for free trials. As many of us know these are almost always quite low. How many people actually ever read books they "Look Inside" on Amazon? How many people finish long articles on the web? Now many people sign up for paying accounts after free trials of your new website? Not very many.

They are not the same as dropout rates in high schools or universities despite what some online education haters say[1]. Like any disruptive technology the existing players are threatened so you need to pay attention to the source of the criticism.

Instead completion rates are a metric that can be used to improve the class such as the suggestions here. The developers of online classes should and are using A/B testing to improve completion rates. However like almost all conversion rates they will likely remain low.

[1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents/High-Costs-of-F...

Back awhile ago free online lecture videos (e.g. Berkeley) were simply uploaded to a page and anyone could go watch them without signing up for a class or otherwise jumping through hoops.

This resulted in me watching a few random lectures about subjects I know little or nothing about. Like econ classes, engineering, science, or similar.

This was good because it was short bursts of information without any hassle, commitment, and similar.

These days everyone has locked their content behind sign up/registration pages, and you're expected to commit to a tradition semester of a class in order to get a worthless certificate of completion.

They also dictate the speed at which you learn. No more learning at your own pace, no, you have to do one a week for as many weeks as it goes on for like it was a traditional class.

And why? Why indeed. Why is online education simulating University education when it actually has no relationship to it? You aren't getting a University qualification by completing a "class," there is no reason why a "class" has to be X number of weeks or you should have to complete the rereq's in order to take it.

Places like Khan Academy have got this right. I can go to Khan Academy right now, click on a video series, watch a few bites of information and then stop when I'm ready/bored. Coursera's class system is just pointless, stressful, and annoying.

If Coursera was transferable then it would absolutely make sense to do. But that doesn't look likely and while that isn't the case they're just making access to learning material more difficult with no obvious benefit to anyone.

You can. But you wont.

The sad fact is that deadline motivate people. Without having deadlines and structure coursera would have gone nowhere.

It's possible and even likely that the schedule contributes to motivation for many, but my experience has been the opposite and I'm probably not unique.

I found class timescales so demotivating I dropped all the Coursera courses in favour of the Udacity ones as soon as it became obvious other things in my life would keep getting in the way.

Many university courses aren't significantly different to Coursera so I think that if the courses keep up their standards and enough people have knowledge of them then it is possible that that certificate will not remain worthless.

We were discussing Coursera at work last week and I think that if a job candidate appeared with Coursera completion certificates on their CV then it wouldn't be looked at unfavourably.

On the other hand, I mostly completed the first algorithms course and Model Thinking, and while Daphne's class kicked my ass the first time, I'm already reviewing to tackle it again and try to finish it this time.

It is true though that the time commitment is horrendous, especially for Daphne's class, which estimates 15-20 hours per week! If I fall behind, I may finish slower than their schedule and miss the homeworks and final exam, in which case I'll officially be an incomplete but I'll still have gotten through all the material.

In short, retention is an irrelevant metric for online classes, especially for Coursera which has such a strong incentive to sign up "unseriously." My suggestion would be to keep accepting and grading homeworks and exams at any time, and give extra props on the certs for completing on time with the other students.

(I've completed the Codeacademy Javascript track, and a full Coursera class (livin' in the 5%, wooo!)).

You say Codeacademy got it right, but I think you're dead wrong. As other articles today have pointed out, at best you're going to learn syntax on codeacademy, and the most basic programming principles, but you'll be miles away from being a capable programmer. The jump from the online editor with tiny little exercises to setting up your own environment and programming your own project is huge. Many of their lessons give misleading or outright incorrect information, not to mention teaching you bad practices.

What this article says is the huge barrier to entry, is not a barrier to entry to online education, but a barrier to entry of learning. What the author proposes is solutions to hide the barrier of learning, by gamifying the platforms and making them more "fun" with a disregard for the depth of effectiveness, and the consequences of pursuing such techniques. (Obviously I'm delving into opinion land, but I strongly believe gamification cheapens and platform and doesn't produce the deep engagement necessary for learning. This is my assessment from my experiences, I'm not going to tell someone their wrong for feeling differently about this. But I think if you wanted to create a deeper experience from gamifying education, it would take a tremendous effort, far different from the typical "Wow you completed 5 exercises! ZOMG KEEP GOING!" joke of rewards that other websites have.

I don't want to rail on the online education effort either, but this is plain cheap thinking. Coursera and EdX are doing an excellent job, but they certainly have many problems to surmount. They've definitely solved the problem of higher education accessibility, now the problems they have are in the effectiveness of education, and on administration and grading that gets the f#$% out of the way of learning. But making it "easier to learn"? I call utter bulls$%t.

I was taking a course on coursera where I thought the professor was talking too quickly --- so I actually slowed it down to 75% the pace in the video. Awesome! I was happy to be able to do that.

Otherwise though, I don't think the course was presented that well. For one, lectures were shitty recordings of slides; I was looking at nothing but text and static images for entire lectures (never seeing the professor's face), and they were blurry, hard to read, and just hard to understand. Of _course_ that makes it harder to learn! I have to focus on figuring out what the hell is written there! And there was no (free) textbook for the course.

Anyway, I think the point I am just trying to make is that while the author of this article might be suggesting to Coursera to take steps in questionable directions, I DO think a lot of those courses could be better polished, and that would make it easier to learn from them.

I'm all for making these platforms more fun, engaging and rewarding. The more the better. But my main point is that the focus, the most important aspect of education is the process of learning and that often requires prolonged focus (to follow along and venture all the way down the rabbit hole of a subject), deep engagement (so your brain can make all of the connections, tie all of the strings together), and interest. The authors suggestions don't really reinforce the process of learning (as I know), they may even weaken it by creating distractions, giving rewards for too little work (obviously subjective, but being subjective you're going to help some people sometimes, and hurt some people sometimes) and getting students to focus on the rewards rather than their understanding, and rather than building implicit positive feelings about their accomplishments.

The lower the retention rate, the more the likelihood that they are following lots of courses at the same time or multitasking with something else. This means that people are "exploring" more! I think that "exploratory learning" has always been stifled by classical organized education and is one of the reasons why I hate most academic environments (yeah, they're cool if you're in one of the top 10% unis or in a "privileged" position", but not for the rest of cases...). I believe that, after a certain level of baseline knowledge, in any field, it's actually more important that someone learns "what they want/need/have inclination for/find more interesting" than that they "learn more"! Maybe more time exploring and less time actually uploading things to your mind is better (not "productive", just "better", and I said "fuck productivity" a lot lately because I found that it just doesn't lead to better anything). All the new ways of doing education make exploration easier (as in you can explore a lot without really "wasting" that much time), and we should take advantage of this!

The ideal model is one of personalized education. What's kind of shocking is that online education so far has basically ignored this altogether. There's been zero investment in ways to continually pace and encourage students to learn at a speed that is both challenging and within reason.

This isn't too surprising: it's a hard problem, and it's much easier to have users paying a subscription fee forever (for those services that are paid) and blame themselves when they fall behind.

At Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) we see evidence that our learning model, which pairs experts and students together much more like you'd expect from tutoring, sees 10x the retention and completion as other online course options.

The future me always has more time, is always more dedicated to learning, is always more focused. So I sign up, and when the class starts I'm no longer the better, stronger, faster, future, me, I'm just me.

Still I manage to finish some, and learn a little from the ones that I drop, so I don't see it as a problem.

Meanwhile, the schools that the authors hold up as more successful examples of education have 20-500 successful graduates per session offered, nearly all of whom are idle young wealthy white people living in rich western countries, and who pay up to several thousand dollars per session each for this privilege.

There is some lower bound to the amount of time that it takes to learn something (absent some educational revolution). Many people aren't even willing to pay that lower bound simply because they have other priorities in life. But they do like to sample (which is good), and potentially finish out a course if nothing else gets in the way.

Online courses are great because they lower the cost of sampling, so we shouldn't be surprised that there are more samplers, and fewer people finishing out the courses. If 1000 people complete an online course, then that's great, even if 99000 people signed up and disappeared a week later.

That being said, I'm pleased to see the specific criticisms offered in the article, and I hope they lead to a better balance for more people.

I signed up for the Hinton neural network class when it was almost over, and completed it well after it ended.

Was I "retained"? Did I not count as completing the class?

Just because there's deadlines doesn't mean you have to finish it by the deadline.

All three overlap at the same time!! And they don't give assurances of when they will be offered again, or even if. Argh. I've started Scala but doubt I'll be able to continue if it I attempt PGN again. This happened to me last fall and I ended up completing none of the three.

Plus, it is apparently "known"... somewhere... that certain courses are easier if you take other courses first... but good luck finding that information when you want to refer to it.

But I also wanted to do the Scala course. I didn't start it because I know I'd not be able to keep up with all three when they overlapped for a few weeks. It's a shame, but I had to prioritize.

What she found was that the course was way more difficult than the description suggested, and proved to be well above what she could understand with her current background. She watched the first video and found that it was going to take way more time than the course description predicted, because she would have to try to fill in a tremendous amount of background knowledge that the teachers presumed. On the plus side, from the course forums she found about resources (videos, etc.) that were more at her current level, and has been working through these.

The comments made elsewhere about the synchronous model for these courses is probably right for her case - she had to wait a number of weeks in order to find out it wasn't the right class for her. This is what you expect when you're in college, at which point you either drop the class and maybe find a different one to take, or tough it out in a class that's not as interesting or useful as you'd hoped. I hope online courses can do better than this.

It's quite possible that this is a function of having so little open content out there right now. I can imagine a future where the background your wife needed would be easy to get from the platform itself, so that the profs' demanding teaching could serve audiences both with and without that background. Right now many of these courses must feel like skyhooks but once they're embedded in a web of knowledge (an earlier commenter called these 'nodes') they'll be more accessible i think.

There's still a huge problem of collecting and sequencing these nodes and I think many students will need direct contact with instructors of some sort to do this.

Maybe in 5 or 10 years there will be enough online courses available that it would be clear that the Duke physiology class is harder, and some other class would be a good prerequisite to it. Or maybe there will be smaller modules that would fill in gaps for students who were close to ready for the class, or maybe it'll all be in smaller modules that you'll assemble into a coherent whole based on your current knowledge.

The thing is, all of these speculations bear empirical confirmation. We have to see what works best in the wild and there will be a coevolution of student behavior, teaching strategies, and companies in the space.

That said, not all material on Coursera is "amazing". Some of the classes have very high completion rate like Functional Programming with Scala has a 19.2% completion rate [1]. Similarly, the class taken by Andrew Ng on Machine Learning is fantastic. However, many of my peers had bad reviews on Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models class. Last year, I myself registered for one of these MOOC's and found that half of the course was good while the other half was quite bad - both halves had different professors.

At some point of time, universities would have to realize that great researchers do not make great teachers. Some excel in both - researching & teaching while some in just one of those two fields.

PS - Other problems on reengagement do stand though.

[0] https://www.udacity.com/ [1] http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html

    Koller's class is difficult, but it's a graduate-level CS class

Or we could ask whether it is a problem. I'm not sure that it is.

I don't think the numbers are surprising or unnatural at all. The thing to compare them against is not traditional education but rather the patterns of all people who take the autodidactic route.. every person who has ever picked up a book and not finished it. Even then, the comparison isn't perfect.

In fact, we could argue that low retention numbers are actually a good thing for non-credit courses. It means that the content is challenging and focused, and that people are able to discover early whether it is or isn't for them or cherry-pick the content that they need and move on.

If there are usability problems, fix them. But if participant retention got dramatically higher, I'd worry.

Codecademy and Udacity allow you to freely dip in and out of lectures and assessments, whereas Coursera courses demand that you deliver quizzes/assignments every week. It's hard to recommend one approach over the other -- with weekly deadlines I find I have more of an incentive to engage in the lectures and course materials, but the added failure conditions can push students to abandon the course.

For my part I sign up for more classes than I could possibly complete. Sometimes I just want to take a peak at the material to see if it grabs me. And sometimes I just want to get familiar with a subject without going all-in, picking and choosing the lectures that are most relevant to me.

People shouldn't feel like they're hurting Coursera's/EdX's/Udacity's stats by dipping their toes.

I hope there will be more short and tightly focused online courses in the future instead of monolithic traditional-length courses we have today. I think that'd go a long way to improving the apparent retention rate.

Why? Three reasons:

First, a 'dirty little secret' of the US software industry is how much of the learning from the beginning of electronic computing to the present has been just from individuals teaching themselves from books, e.g., K&R on C, Lippman on C++, Ullman on database, Sedgewick on algorithms, and on-line, e.g., Microsoft's MSDN site, StackOverflow, etc., essentially independently without courses, lectures, problem sessions, credits, homework, tests, etc.

Or since just K&R, ..., StackOverflow, etc. have been responsible for so much learning so far, then 'the bar is low' and on-line courses should do even better.

Second, in my experience in technical subjects, pure and applied math, mathematical physics, some topics in electronic engineering, e.g., surrounding the fast Fourier transform (FFT), and software, with a class or not, nearly all the learning (in my case) took place from study, alone, in a quiet room, from good materials just on paper. My 'educated guess' is that on-line learning can't replace such learning but can help stimulate more of it.

Third, for a researcher in applied math and software, and also likely some other fields, one of the main 'work items' is to take recent books and papers and work through them much as working through advanced course materials in such subjects.

Back to my case, in the fields I worked hardest on and did the best in, math, physics, and software, starting in the ninth grade, through my Ph.D., and in my career to the present, I did nearly all the work with relatively little contribution from teachers. E.g., in plane geometry my teacher was the most offensive person I've ever known in education, and I slept in her class and refused to admit doing her assigned homework. Instead, I worked every non-trivial problem in the book including the more advanced supplementary problems in the back where she never made any assignments. Then, after working all those problems, no wonder, on the state test in the subject, I did fine: I came in second best in the class; the guy who beat me also beat me by a few points on the Math SAT -- we were 1, 2 in the school. Net, my approach to learning plane geometry worked fine.

I never took freshman calculus. The college I started at wanted me to take some math that really was just a review of what I'd covered in four years of math in high school. So, a girl in the class let me know when the tests were, and I showed for those. The teacher said I was the best math student he'd ever had. Meanwhile, I got a good calculus book and started in, worked hard, and did well. For my sophomore year I went to a much better college and started on their sophomore calculus and did fine. Yup, never took freshman calculus.

When I went to graduate school, I took a problem with me and had an intuitive solution. My first year had some good courses (one was just terrific, from a star student of E. Cinlar now long at Princeton) and gave me what I needed to turn my intuitive solution into a solid math solution; I did that in my first summer, independently; and that was the research for my Ph.D.

I continued that way in my career: E.g., in a software house working for the US DoD, I saw a problem in a specification, got Blackman and Tukey, 'The Measurement of Power Spectra', and read it carefully enough to see what was wrong with the specification and how to fix it. Right: without courses, lectures, problem sessions, ....

As far as I can tell, nearly all the technical content on HN, StackOverflow and other Internet fora is from people who taught themselves in similar ways with little or nothing in courses, lectures, problem sessions, .... And that's part of what researchers have to do and is just part of getting tenure as a research professor.

So, since so much work is being done by essentially independent study now, just by not making things worse on-line courses should be able to look successful.

But I see some problems with the on-line materials I tried:

(1) The video quality just sucked. I couldn't read the board. That meant I couldn't copy what was on the board and study it. Bummer.

(2) The sound quality was not good enough.

(3) The course materials, e.g., on paper or in PDF files, were from not good enough down to just missing.

(4) Sadly the quality of the course content was too low; apparently the main reason was the desire to make the course more 'appropriate', that is, 'easier', for 'the common man in the street'. But, omitting material 'waters down' the course content and, really, for a good student, requires that they fill in the gaps for themselves -- bummer.

E.g., I looked at the course by Stanford professor Ng on 'Machine Learning'. What I saw were weaknesses (1)-(4) above. For more, (A) a lot that he was doing was maximum likelihood estimation but with far too little explanation and justification; so, I would have had to have run off and studied maximum likelihood estimation on my own. So, again I was on my own to do some independent work, trusting Professor Ng that somehow maximum likelihood estimation was better than it has long seemed in the statistics community. (B) He mentioned the 'maximization' to be done via following gradients, and that is an overly simplistic and not very promising approach to maximization -- the standard, first problem is that spend nearly all the computing time moving in directions nearly orthogonal to the direction really should be moving in.

So, from (A) and (B), I concluded that for a good course I would have had to have taken his lectures just as topics to be investigated, gone to good materials elsewhere, collected good details, and written my own text. That's his job as a professor, not my job as a student. His field, 'machine learning', didn't look worth that much work for me now. I've done some serious work in several cases of applied math that could be called 'machine learning' as much as his material, and I'm left without much respect for his material.

I looked at the course 'Probabilistic Graphical Models' taught by Daphne Koller. Since I very much liked a course by a star student of E. Cinlar, maybe I should like Kollar's course. Sorry, I didn't -- the quality looked too low. Better quality from Stanford? Sure, K. Chung, H. Royden, D. Luenberger (his 'Optimization by Vector Space Methods' is a beautifully, even elegantly, done one mile long applied math dessert buffet), D. Knuth.

For courses in 'how to code', that is, introductory material in software, gotta be kidding! 'Coding' alone is easy; it's just, pick a language, learn the basic syntax, and write if-the-else, do-while, call-return, allocate-free, etc. It's easy but doesn't take one very far. So, don't get very far with thousands of Web pages of documentation at MSDN on .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, administration of SQL Server, IIS, Windows Server, etc. or the equivalent in the Linux world.

I have two broad conclusions:

First, traditionally in academic material in technical subjects, the author and the student 'reached' to each other, and they connected at a well written textbook. So, the author went far enough toward the student to prepare a good text -- and the best texts are terrific. And the student reached far enough toward the author to make do with little or no more than a good text. It's how I learned plane geometry, freshman calculus, theoretical, applied, and numerical linear algebra, everything I learned about statistics, most of what I learned about advanced calculus, signal processing and the FFT, stochastic optimal control, artificial intelligence, ..., and everything I learned about software. E.g., it's heavily what worked for me.

The on-line community will have to face the fact of this 'reaching'. In effect, on-line learning requires the professor to do more work of a kind that promises not to be well rewarded by tenure and promotion committees. So, net, so far a student should still reach mostly for one of the best texts, on paper or PDF.

Second, the situation will 'settle out': The professors will come to understand what minimum quality is needed, and the students will realize that the learning is not just a spectator sport, is not like watching a movie, and still requires nearly all the traditional work from a book or PDF file. Then the courses will get better; the students just looking to watch a movie won't sign up; and the course completion rates will increase.

Part of that means helping the professor craft every email to the class to maximize engagement. In fact, the professor probably shouldn't even be doing _any_ of that administrative stuff. The MOOC should handle all of that, including the skills required to "extend the reach towards the students" as you aptly put it.

I think Coursera and EdX can do much better at using their design and content marketing talent to make these classes more accessible and successful.

There's an interesting balance here. Professors I've talked to bemoan the lack of 'support' from Coursera (usually the universities provide a pot of money for profs to use themselves). But at the same time they would balk at some marketing guru coming in an 'spinning' their course. Profs are used to large amounts of freedom in their courses and aren't used to incorporating feedback from the outside into their plans.

It's a tough line to walk I think: freedom vs accessibility.

But regardless, I think many profs would feel like marketing help of any kind would be more like spinning content to make it more attractive to students, and worry about the integrity of what they're teaching.

Some more of what you are saying, e.g., about marketing, design, and e-mails to students, definitely would help. However, I assumed that such things were asking too much of poor schools and that, really, the HN readers who dug through K&R, etc. on their own with no marketing, design, encouraging e-mails, etc. didn't really need such nice hand holding.

But I will say, at some crucial points for me, some teachers did play a crucial role: The college I graduated from then had a quite good math department, and some of the teaching aimed at me personally in some of the courses was just excellent and got me going so that I could continue on to 'the next level' in math via independent work. Then for on-line learning, as progress is made on the first, and easiest work, many of the students will need some 'personalized TLC' or risk getting off track, slowing down, and stopping.

Part of such TLC will be overviews: That is, it needs to be more clear to students what the value, purpose, or promise is of various parts of the course.

Another part of TLC is that students need to write some things, e.g., homework exercises, term papers, something like lab reports, and have their work read by an expert and 'corrected'. E.g., a place to learn nicely polished skills in writing about functions, maps, mappings, relations, etc. is in a theorem proving course in abstract algebra where a good professor actually corrects some student homework. Then when work with functions, maps, ..., in computing, will get the notation and terminology right; without such TLC, often won't get those things right. E.g., earlier today I read a little about hashing passwords, and the material mentioned a function "between the hashes and passwords". No, "between" is not appropriate. The usual description, and appropriate, is a function f from the set of hashes to the set of passwords. To be clear and not just picky, function f may not define a function g from the set of passwords to the set of hashes because there may be a password p such that there is no hash h so that f(h) = p. That is, the function f may not be 'onto', i.e., 'surjective' as at

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surjective_function

There's an old lesson in 'education': Get the student able to continue on in learning on their own. For that, usually some 'personalized TLC' is needed at a few crucial points in a student's development. To be really successful, the on-line approach will have to include some of that TLC also.

Another idea I had was that students who completed a course, and achieved a certain level of proficiency, would get access to a special forum. This forum could be shared by potential employers.

At kenHub[1], we offer anatomy online training for medical students, physiotherapists etc. Since we are working in a collaboration with the Charité University[2], we offer students at the university the same content other students pay for, completely free. Our statistics shows around a factor of 8x in engagement of paying vs. non-paying students[3].

[1]https://www.kenhub.com [2]http://www.charite.de/en/charite [3]http://imgur.com/5eG3teP

Before I read the fine article (which I recommend you read too), I was going to react just to the headline. And that reaction is still there. The reason we (correctly) criticize lack of retention in online education is that online education makes apparent metrics that show the lack of retention. But I would suggest, for learned discussion by all the participants here, that most forms of classroom learning, and especially compulsory secondary schooling in most of the developed world, suffers from a very bad lack of engagement on the part of the students. (Some of the comments posted here before this comment tell stories about that.) A high school student may attend classes often enough to avoid being expelled and gain a diploma, but the student may operate in "regurgitate and forget" mode the whole time he is in high school, not really remembering anything he supposedly was taught. The one kind of deep learning many high school students engage in is learning how to pretend to be studying. If online education develops better demonstrations of learner acquisition of knowledge and skill than mere seat time in a classroom, it may be a powerful force for exposing the dirty secret of classroom education.

If you have issues with the class, that's a personal problem and you simply need to work on your willpower.

For the Coursera classes I did sign up for, I did it because I am interested in the subject area, know almost nothing currently and wanted to gain some functional understanding. I would say of the classes I signed up for, and probably 50% of those I have seen all the lectures. But then I go off and incorporate into side projects to test out / make sure I understand the materials. I have never turned in an assignment, (almost) never posted on a message board and never opened a final exam. Why should I? I am going straight to the application of the content into my projects, I've already achieved my goal of understanding and expanding my capabilities.

What reasons would someone have for wanting official completion of the course? On most courses, you do not gain any officially recognized credit, the certificate has limited (if any) commercial marketability for someone... so again, why would I want to go through the hassle of officially completing the course?

Two takeaways from these thoughts are the following: 1) How many people like myself have utilized the content of the course but are not seen as retained due to the fact they do not partake in the academic completion side? 2) What potential motivators can exist in the future to drive completion of the academic side of the coures? (college credit is the first one that comes to mind, but still does not help motivating many users who are above that age). What other drivers could come into being to incentivize?

The biggest thing I noticed were the clueless forum posts by students who obviously had not read much of the provided material. Two of the classes had material similar to ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" and this was largely ignored. I think we are seeing the fall out of the distraction of modern society. Sadly, tl;dr doesn't work with complex technical material.

That said, it was a privilege to interact with motivated fellow students. Their input in the forums helped eliminate misconceptions.

By the way, the statistics for our Data Analysis class were similar to those from the OP - from the instructor: "There were approximately 102,000 students enrolled in the course, about 51,000 watched videos, 20,000 did quizzes, and 5,500 did/graded the data analysis assignments."

Coursera and other MOOCs are media properties that monetize viewership (thorugh certificates rather than ads). As media properties, michaelochurch and others are right that the synchronous model isn't really going to work in the long term.

I think ed tech should be about connecting teachers with the content they need to teach (and I'd include self-educators amongst 'teachers' here). Students need synchronous access to teachers, but those teachers don't necessarily have to have created that content just now. This suggests that online education might look more like a 1:100 teacher-student ratio rather than 1:100k. Nothing's more motivating and engaging than a human being.

Personally, my best experiences have come from two sources: self-study from great materials and guided study from great teachers. This suggests that a role for ed tech might be connecting great teacher with great content rather than broadcasting teacher-as-content. Personalization, engagement, motivation, etc all come for free if we empower great teachers rather than seek to replace them.

It's misguided to think that some professor from a great school can best deliver the content to all audiences. Imagine great open content accessible to every teacher for use in their own classrooms. With an inverted model of teaching, the lets them push content out to the students for self-study and then have synchronous classes where they, the teacher, can motivate and customize the delivery of tough concepts for their particular group of students.

Interesting model. I like the thought of trying to align student and instructor motivations. Getting paid for engagement is a great way to do that.

I wonder, though, if it puts pressure on the difficulty of the tasks? Can instructors game this system (if they wanted to, as I'm sure most don't) by the types of tasks they assign, thereby potentially impacting the quality of your content?

Our partners can put whatever they want in our system. So far our partners are providing free classes to train their customers on new products and features. If a customer learns all the features in your product, it becomes stickier (hopefully).

1. Videos are usually too long. There isn't a natural break to stop and try things out. (Udacity does a good job with this one.)

2. Information density isn't constant. With text, this isn't an issue: I naturally adjust my reading speed if I hit a sparse or dense area. With video, I have to either live with it or constantly re-adjust the video speed.

I don't plan on giving up, but I'm curious if others have had that experience or if I'm the only person who's figured out how to use Codeacademy without actually learning to code.

His bait is retention .. and that's something HN readers understand from a business POV. But retention isn't his issue. Retention is a problem for Coursera et al.

His problem (and mine) is that we (personally) found it hard to stay the course. And Coursera don't help us.

I've a full time job, two side projects, a small business and a family. I'm about to start the Gamification course and I probably wont finish it because I don't have time. Not because I don't want to, but because the course expects all students to spend 4-6 hours per week studying. Those weeks would be rare for me.

How hard would it be to offer a 2 hour-per-week version? Or whatever commitment I'm able to make? Then, when the inevitable happens, let me hit the 'pause' button.

The only thing I don't particularly like is the inflexibility on turning in assignments. I completed five classes but did not pass one because something happened work wise that caused me to turn it several assignments late and that really knocked down my score. Great class though.

I have also started four other classes that I dropped after 1-3 weeks. I am still glad I was exposed to some of the material for those classes, so still a positive experience.

Accepting the figure that 95% of students drop classes on average, I would like to know if most of those people in general felt their time had been worthwhile spent. That is the important question.

CodeAcademy (also wonderful) is a completely different animal. It is not comparable to Coursera.

What you're calling a bug (aka "dirty secret") of Coursera is actually a huge feature: that we can all, whatever our goals or our budget, sign up and check it out. Quite unlike an class at MIT or Duke, which is only available to a pre-selected few.

In short, the MOOCs, and specifically Coursera, are awesome. We are so lucky to have this opportunity. Quit yer bellyachin'.

IMO for a class with tens of thousands people signed up, 5% retention rate is not really that bad.

Personally, I've signed up for dozens of Coursera courses but I've only completed one (Game Theory). It's not necessarily that the other courses were lacking the ability to keep me enrolled, but rather I never planned to try at them. I sign up to most classes to see the videos and get surface-level understanding of a subject.

The next step for online education is get a real qualification that improves your job prospects through places like Coursera.

Also I think there are a bunch of other hacks such as collaborative motivation (getting a group of members to commit to each other to complete the course and automatically reporting to each other when they have completed each section where everyone in the group has collective responsibility to help each person in the group to complete the course.

For Stanford's database class that just finished we had 64 thousand register, but only 20,000 actually do some work, and then close to 5k actually take the final or get a statement of accomplishment.

My blog response: http://sef.kloninger.com/2013/03/online-ed-retention/

I'm the engineering manager on Class2Go, Stanford's open-source MOOC platform. Check it out: http://class2go.stanford.edu/

We have to ask ‘Why do people make cost-free momentary decisions and then fail to act on them?’. Do we think this an important question? I suggest most of us have much better things to do with our time than agonize over this.

I want to know as much as I can about different subjects but I want to immerse myself in them to different levels.

Sometimes I am happy just to stick a few videos on in the background while I do something else, so I get the gist of what something is about and know what to focus on later if I need more information.

I don't necessarily care if I could pass an exam or not.

The guy presenting, Ed Hess, was very skilled and interesting and the material was very relevant. I also enjoyed the discussion of various homework on the course forum.

Having taken online courses from the start my sense is that enrollment/participation is slowing. The bulletin boards of some classes are pretty dead on the first run.

Its not crazy to think that the people most likely to take the classes would participate right away and finding the next batch of students will be harder.

We are talking about a new model, low "retention" seems to be normal for free clases wich have absolutely no barrier of entry.

I have taken 5 courses, only finished 2 "on time". For the other 3 I downloaded the material, got some exercises on sites like MIT OCW, and finished them at my own pace.

The main incentive to power through a Coursera course is personal enrichment. This is not the reason most people go to college.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churn_rate

I've tried pretty much all of the "MOOC's" out there, and so far the only two I've stuck with were Codecademy and Udacity. Why? Precisely for the reasons that are mentioned at the article which started this discussion. The format of Edx and Coursera is just all wrong for most people who DO want to learn something but have a busy life that is not conducive to a traditional college class.

Besides which, all too often, Coursera and Edx just throw a college class online (lectures, course notes, homeworks, quizzes, and tests) and call it a day. Then they have arbitrary deadlines--which I acknowledge might help some people but the first time I got a deadline email I decided that it wasn't for me...no matter how interested I was in the class topic. I'm already married and a father who is working part-time while doing a Master's program in Computer Science. So I don't have huge chunks of time available for traditional course work (in addition to my Master's coursework). I have little bits of time every day which I use effectively to progress through the Codecademy and Udacity coursework. Slowly but steadily I'm getting through both and making substantial progress.

But, since Coursera and Edx require huge blocks of time committed every week, and a tight timeline to complete the course, I just don't find it's workable. Which is sad since they seem to offer some tremendous material.

In short, I think that Coursera and Edx (and probably colleges in general) should learn a thing or two from the highly modularized approach of Udacity and Codecademy.

I find that my learning retention and interest remains much higher with both Udacity and Codecademy because they present a little material (little bite-size chunks) which slowly build into more and more challenging material and intersperse "challenges" or "quizzes" throughout--rather than the traditional approach which--by necessity--was far less responsive.

The fact is that online learning doesn't just reach potentially numerous people that wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to such educational opportunities at such a low price (currently free), it potentially allows for a radical rethinking of the traditional education model.

I think that it is sheer ignorance to say, as some have in the comments I've read (and as--apparently--Coursera maintains), that those who don't finish a course just aren't interested enough or motivated enough. This is ridiculous. The very same (allegedly "unmotivated" or "undisciplined" or "uninterested") people may be successfully working their way through Codecademy or Udacity. And yes, it may take them a while, but eventually they'll complete a Codecademy "track" or a Udacity course. And they'll do it one bite-size chunk at a time...and sometimes, say on a weekend, they'll plow through a whole bunch of bite-sized chunks.

When Coursera and Edx adopt a more bite-sized format which isn't oriented around arbitrary deadlines, I'll check them out again. Until then I'll stick with Codeacademy and Udacity.

Bottom-line: the standard model is broken. Lectures and homeworks and quizzes and tests are poor ways to educate. For many years they were the best we could do within the technological constraints we faced. But now we can do better. Heck, I'd encourage everyone working the bleeding edge of online education to think "outside the box" and try new approaches. While the best new approaches I've seen have been those utilized by Udacity and Codecademy, that's not to say that there aren't even better methods--methods better at retaining learners (keeping learners engaged), AND methods which excel at increasing retention of material.

Sigh.

* The Dabbler will pick up tons of things, "overjoyed" about the newness that they are learning. Eventually, they hit their first plateau and the 'newness' becomes boring and they'll seek out another activity to experience the same 'newness' high. Maybe they'll come back to it later and see if they can progress again.

* The Obsessive will seek out perfection on this new activity, pouring over every YouTube video or article to figure out how to be better. When they plateau, they'll try harder; hoping for the same results. If the return isn't there, the Obsessive will look for another activity.

* The Hacker will actually ride out the plateau potentially indefinitely. In some cases, this will create progress eventually, but in others, it can become the cap of their learning capability (hence, 'a hack'). They just don't put the extra effort needed to progress further.

While all these types are negative, two-thirds drop the activity for something new, something they might be a natural at. From a business perspective, a monthly subscription favors Hacker-type customers; where a 'per course' pricing scheme favors Dabblers.

Steering back to online courses, I think the issue isn't 100% the site's fault; but that certain students will join for the excitement, but fan out eventually (Leonard goes on later to discuss how to better approach each of these types as the Teacher). I've signed up to all of the sites in the article, along with Udacity (where I'm currently taking the Web Dev course). For Udacity and edX, I've completed the courses I've signed up for; however at Duolingo, I stopped after the Basics 1 in Spanish. I want to learn Spanish, but the drive and time isn't there for me.

Jumping back to 'Mastery', Leonard talks about 5 keys that can help promote mastery and can be used to retain students: Instruction, Practice, Surrender, Intentionality, and The Edge.

* Instruction is obvious: have great teachers(not just through credentials, but are generally good AT teaching), something these sites offer tenfold.

* Practice is where I felt edX's course fell through. It was a lot of lecture, but the Finger Exercises were more the tradition 'regurgitation' of knowledge from traditional classes. Duolingo and Udacity (at least the Web course) seem to have this concept taken care of. Duolingo offers different ways to practice and at least with Web Development, you can to see the fruits of your labor with each class.

* Surrender is more for the student than the instructor, but talks about accepting you aren't a Master as something and so sometimes you need to take two steps back to take one step forward (in Aikido, we refer to this a 'Kihon Waza', or practicing the basics). So many people have the mindset of "If you're not doing it this way, you're doing it the wrong way", that this can stifle learning. As an instructor, thinking up new and creative ways to practice the basics can help alleviate this.

* Intentionality talks about visualizing the action, and while focused more on physical activities, could be utilized online. Give the students a view at the end results/expected return on their time. Sure, its dangling the proverbial 'carrot on a stick' in front of them, but it can help them sees where the fruits of their labor. If you can mix this with some of the Practice key, you could get better results (IMO).

* The Edge tip-toes the line between endless practice and pushing the envelope (though Leonard says it isn't). For a new student, this can be a little harder, considering they are still learning; but creation of 'outside the box' milestone/projects could benefit from this. The student's amassed this bit of knowledge; make them use it in a less than cookie cutter way. This would be a great undertaking by online courses, due to how do you 'personally' grade someone's submission, especially overtime? Maybe setting it up in a 'there is no right/wrong answer' way, namely because if a student takes a risk, they shouldn't be penalized for it.

Like I said, I'd recommend the book. I teach community college currently, and while most this is anecdotal opinion, I feel like it's helped me maintain engaged students.

Synchronous learning, IMO, is an anachronism. We have video recording technology, practically infinite bandwidth, and near speed of light communication. The idea of synchronous learning, where you have five thousand teachers teaching the same Calculus I class every year, is predicated on a world where these technologies don't exist.

As an aside, for this reason I think the collegiate model is going to completely change in the near future as people start realizing how absurd it is. The real value professors provide is having someone to answer questions (and in a lot of cases, professors don't even take questions during lecture). And even that functionality can and is (in my experience) mostly replaced by other students in the class or students who have already taken the class.

Put the material up, and let communities form around it. I don't need the professor to answer my questions, all I need is the relevant forum (in the original sense) to ask.

  I usually sign up for a bunch of classes just so I can 
  access the material at a later point when I have time or 
  when I'm interested.

Personally I find the synchronous model helps me complete the course, as it removes the temptation to put things off.

I also find the assignments/exercises on the courses are first class and that's where a lot of the learning comes in especially when backed up by discussion forum activity from other students. Watching the videos on their own doesn't really appeal to me.

There is something dispiriting to me about a synchronous model. Once I can't keep up I tend to drop it as a failure, knowing there's no point in working through something that might be removed at any point. I also think it's the way I respond to the "don't break the chain" apps. Once life gets in the way and I do break the chain, I feel like a failure.

I'm quite happy to motivate myself however, so Udacity's model of giving the student however long they need, works perfectly.

Presumably online videos could let you cut down on some class time, but even 1 hour after watching a video your going to forget some of your questions and much of the context of other questions you remember.

PS: If you took calculus in a setting of 500 people where you could not ask questions you still got ripped off even if there was a teacher in the room.

Is having a professor there that you can ask immediately in the moment (and interrupt the lecture for the other students who understood the material) worth $1000 per credit hour?

I used the database course to supplement a database course that I was taking at the same time, and it was not just a stark difference in quality but also fantastic that I could pick the pieces of material that I needed to learn better and watch those lectures at my speed and how I wanted!

It's important to me that all course materials are available at the start of the course, and until at least a year after I take the course. Otherwise give me an easy way to download the course materials as a bundle to use in the future.

Unfortunately, they have much less courses available, and they're all more or less computer science related.

I believe this is due to the constraints of the tradional class format. It is simply impossible to both cover the material and answer very many questions in typical length of a class. This means that if the class has more than a small number of students their questions simply cannot be answered during the lecture.

This is why many larger classes are divided into sections with labs run by grad students. These smaller forums are are better for discussion but their quality depends on finding grad students who are good at teaching. This is also fundamentally not scalable.

Online learning has the potential to break thru this limitation. The recent wave of MOOCs are a huge improvement over the online classes of just a few years ago. I believe there is still lots of room for improvement from both tailoring the class to the individual student (e.g fast vs slow pace) and A/B testing which has only just begun to be applied.

Interestingly some of these improvements can be applied to tradional classes some of which are already using online discussion forums and automated grading. A hybrid approach (in person lectures and discussions with full online support) will probably provide the best overall quality but will be more expensive than a pure online approach and not practical for people who can't physically attend classes.

It's not really a retention problem if you offer something for free and tons of people have a look without making much commitment. Having said that, probably the only relevant statistics about these courses are how many people did them and completed the assignments/tests.

It's not a "dirty secret", though. One should know and expect that. If anything, low retention is a good thing insofar as it means that the courses are demanding and people who aren't dedicated trickle out.

I feel like we have three problems to solve in online education. I'm sure there are plenty more, but 4 stand out right now:

(1) Hidden node discovery. You're 23. You just learned Python. You want to be a Data Scientist in 3 years. How do you get there? "Data Scientist job" is one node, and there are a bunch of prerequisites to those (hidden nodes) and prerequisites to those. How do you navigate this network? The 23-year-old programmer doesn't know where those hidden nodes are. In other words, the Google for Learning and Development.

(2) Forward learning. Recommendations. Things that would be interesting to a person that she doesn't know she wants to know, because she doesn't know that it exists. Since there's a lot of investment here (you're not just buying a book and possibly reading it, but anticipating putting 50+ cognitively intense hours into a course) it would be nice if the service gave indications as to why it was making those rec's.

(3) Interactivity and (buzzword warning) "gameification". When you haul out an 800-word machine learning textbook, you often have to go for a long time (hours) without the "kick". There's a flat array of 50 exercises of which 25 are easy, and 25 are really hard and will take a long time (they might be worth doing, but they aren't quick) and it's hard to pick which ones to focus on. The programming exercises in texts often don't get your creative juices flowing. Not a lot of people can get through long spells without feedback, and the skill of "making your own feedback" seems to be losing ground in our distracted culture.

(4) "Social". Online study groups. This is Big and I don't know how it's going to evolve. How do we keep quality control in place and make sure that our automated expert discovery mechanisms work?

As someone who has personal interaction with the disorder (I'm not officially diagnosed, but probably have it, my son has it, several siblings, nieces and nephews as well), I hate this phrase. Because people use it to mean the exact opposite of what the actual disorder is.

People with ADD or ADHD (different names for pretty much the same thing) do not lack focus. To the contrary, a primary characteristic is extreme focus. Instead we lack the ability to focus on what we are told to focus on.

Society labels this "distractibility" because the person does not focus on what those around would want them to focus on (following instructions, getting dressed, doing homework, etc) but instead goes back to what interests them (bugs, dinosaurs, math, etc). But in terms of ability to get fascinated by something, then follow through on complex tasks, people with ADD or ADHD are significantly more capable than the general public.

People with ADHD or ADD don't have executive control of what they will focus on. Inability to focus on what you're told to focus on is noticed in most environments as not listening to instructions, inability to stay on assigned task, poor attention to detail if you do stay on assigned task, etc. Everything in that link you posted is covered. In most environments your excellent focus on things you're NOT "supposed" to be doing is not likely to be noticed. Or if it is noticed, it likely increases frustration over the inability to pay attention to assigned tasks.

Speaking personally, I was very confused when screening for ADHD was recommended for my son. He seemed to have excellent focus - at 3 he would often get involved in a detailed task for half an hour or more, at 5 he would sit quietly through a full length documentary, then demonstrate how much he had learned for days afterwards. It was not until my sister explained from her experience that this was, in fact, characteristic that I became less resistant to having him screened.

I was also resistant to medicating him because I'd absorbed all of the usual biases about how overmedicating leads to drug abuse. However after being pointed to the statistics for ADHD, medication became a no-brainer. Children with ADHD do not become addicted to their medication, and have the same risks of drug abuse as the general population. By contrast ADHD people who are not treated are at massively increased risk for all kinds of drug abuse, including both prescription drug abuse and cocaine. (Cocaine is an interesting one since it actually is an effective ADHD medication! Though inconvenient, illegal, and subject to abuse.)

Therefore popular wisdom is exactly backwards - appropriate medication for ADHD reduces the odds of drug abuse later in life.

I have a child with a diagnosis that significantly increases the risk of his failing to graduate, using drugs, becoming a convicted felon, suffering accidental death, and being unable to hold down a regular job. There is a safe medication that addresses all of those risks, with reasonably moderate side effects.

If some day you have a child in the same situation, you'll be free to try whatever unproven experimental course of action you want. But I see no point in taking such risks with my child's future.

Here are various narratives I've had for myself:

1) Child prodigy

2) Failed child prodigy

3) Something's not right about work / study. I know what to do, but in the moment I do the wrong thing or procrastinate egregiously.

4) ADHD (medicated)

5) ADHD (stopped medication due to side-effects and depression)

6) Square peg / round hole. Make (startup) or find square hole.

7) Found square hole. First non-founder programmer at regional success story mobile games company. Crucial to the company, recognized / compensated as such. In demand.

Guess what hasn't changed all that much through all of these narratives? Me. I've just become ... optimized. I'm still terrible at time-sheets and coming in before 11. I would be a failure in a place that expected that.

P.S. Check for sleep issues (e.g. sleep apnea). As a society, I think we encourage and tolerate sleep deprivation to an absurd degree. From what I've seen, chronic sleep deprivation is indistinguishable from ADHD.

So I reduce distractions and work in a black box. With only one task in front of you, you get it done.

I simply cannot work if I am not in a quiet environment.

You make a really strong point. Going back and changing it.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/nerd_sniping.png

For those of us who find the synchronous style to be a sufficient motivator, it's a great benefit. For people who fall behind but want to cover the material, they're welcome to do so. The grades don't actually matter, remember? Coursera is already "gamified." It's just that the game is done so well that most of the time we're not aware of it.

https://github.com/jplehmann/coursera/

The author said he really "intended" to take the class, but did he? Or did he just like the idea of it?

Learning is hard work. Learning difficult subjects is harder still, and it's very demanding of your time. There's really no way around that fact.

Let's be honest here, a lot of subjects sound interesting, but are you really willing to put in the time and effort to learn about them? It's never going to be painless.

I'm pretty much constantly in a Coursera course, but I drop half of them. I'm over feeling bad about it. Turns out I wasn't as interested in the topic as I thought. For other courses I am, and I do the work.

Learning is hard work. Period. Granted, its a different kind of work, and can be really enjoyable. As you stated, you need to put in the time and certain topics cannot be "watered down" too much no matter how hard the instructor may try.

The benefit of these sites are that anyone can sample the menu as there is no real downside. If one were to actually pay some fee for the course, the chances of sampling the different courses would really go down.

I don't believe there really is an issue here. Being able to try out different courses and realizing what you like and don't like is so incredibly powerful.

What can be improved on is to identify these types of learners. Coursera could start out right of the bat asking, "How likely are you to finish this course." The metric of completion should not be used to judge a course either.

I have finished six coursera/udacity classes so far. The last one felt really hard, not because of the material or the teacher. I wasn't really interested in the subject. It was something that I thought it would be good and useful to learn, but I was not passionate about it. So, last night, I finally finished the course, but it wasn't easy.

So really the questions that I should be asking next time is which class I really feel passionate about, and/or how do I become passionate about the class that I am taking.

The only things I'd like from Coursera courses are:

* more that take 8-10 weeks rather than 6 weeks

* if the CS course happens to use a particular language then make it incredibly easy to get setup and provide downloadable structure for any assignments (the scala coursera course has that nailed)

* better estimates for # hours a week

In general thought the synchronous approach works perfectly for me and is the big reason I haven't yet felt the need to do any Udacity courses.

But, the companies that have immediate need for a data scientist--those are the folks who have a vested interest in the problem being solved. The trick I think will come down to getting companies involved without having them mucking them up like most "corporate training" is these days.

I guess that's a bit of what's missing for many of the online options so far--a direct "if you do this this will happen" value proposition for the students. Right now it's all driven by our curiosity and a desire to learn, which is great and drives many of us to sign up, but sometimes doesn't trump all the "life" that gets in the way after the coursework gets tough.

Duke researchers who actually taught a course on Coursera put together a comprehensive report on their experiences. In it, they specifically address the drop-out issue. I highly recommend it: http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/...

I'd love to talk to someone who's on the same page, do you think I could pick your brains on this? If so, a contact email is on my profile page :)

Why not cut out the middle man and have academics and practionsers actually recommend the courses, and guide people through. Pretty much the only thing we cannot automate right now is real good editing it is sorely needed in journalism, books, what to watch on tv and education courses.

(2) see editing

On both the above points I get the feeling you worry / hope that we shall need to automate huge swathes of this, but I think education is an intensive production - akin to books or films. And so would be due similar levels of review attention.

(3) I think that's not the needed approach - everyone learns at different paces and gets stuck at different points. With maths one approach is large numbers of gradually changing mini tests - if you keep making the same mistake that area is reviewed and revisited till you get it right. I know an Bristol based company doing this now in schools, the success rate - hard to say but the approach seems solid.

Repitition seems to be the mainstay of human learning.

(4) I don't understand- what is automated expert discovery systems? Study groups are an inherently emergent social phenomena - humans are really good at those, so this would be my least worrisome issue - an online calendar and Skype meetings as an example.

And then we can use an artificial intelligence algorithm to combine the recommendations of all the academics and practitioners, to get an index of recommendations across all fields.

Call it PractictionerRank, or PeerRank, or BookRank, or....

I am wondering why this can't be an actual web application? Have different topics, (ie. Learn Web Development, Python, Javascript) and actually have a listing/review of all the credible sources on the internet that one can use to do the learning. It would just be a listing but have others who learned the material, describe how they did it and have them review the resources.

It's come to a point where this is really needed. Just typing "learn javascript" on Google is just not good enough.

Is there something like this out there already?

I wish the author would have discussed Udacity.

This. You need gumption to succeed in a traditional university course so surely the same will apply to a MOOC with adequately difficult content?

MOOC have organized material and information in classes, but now it needs to also curate "tracks".