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MOOCs — massive open online courses — grant huge numbers of people access to world-class educational resources, but they also suffer high rates of attrition.
To some degree, that's inevitable: Many people who enroll in MOOCs may have no interest in doing homework, but simply plan to listen to video lectures in their spare time.
Others, however, may begin courses with the firm intention of completing them but get derailed by life's other demands. Identifying those people before they drop out and providing them with extra help could make their MOOC participation much more productive.
[...] Last week, at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, MIT researchers showed that a dropout-prediction model trained on data from one offering of a course can help predict which students will stop out of the next offering. The prediction remains fairly accurate even if the organization of the course changes, so that the data collected during one offering doesn't exactly match the data collected during the next.
Any MOOC alumni care to comment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @02:11AM
All MOOCs are not created equal. Some are there only to make money and provide no value for students. Others are there to genuinely help students learn new things. And there are others who will give you a certificate only if you pay a bribe. But generally, the exams or tests or quizzes are not the same as for campus students, so there is lesser value in most of today's MOOCs.
I believe online learning is the future of all learning. If it can be done online, then why not. The MOOC structure is only starting and needs to grow quite a bit.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday October 22 2015, @02:47AM
I'm not so sure about that. The theory and lectures, sure. The labs, not so much. I doubt most bio students could afford their own GC/MS. I doubt most Med Students could afford a human corpse shipped to their doorstep or a modern X-ray scanner, legally if not financially. Chemistry/Chemical engineering students? Maybe electrical and mechanical engineering students could get away with it by buying or leasing cheap oscilloscopes or 3-D printers. Or perhaps the administrators of MOOCS would have to form partnerships with local facilities, which would make them not fully online.
Computer Science and everything else? Maybe. But around these parts, although you can find schools offering tons of online classes, accredited online upper-level math classes are still conspicuously absent.
The reason for that addresses a dirty little secret -- online classes are convenient, true, but because there is the potential for taking them to check off a requirement (and fatten the tuition fee cash cow) rather than actually learn something. Would you hire a mathematician who was able to Matlab-away his or her entire curriculum?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Thursday October 22 2015, @03:42AM
The other students are a huge part of it. But, so is just the act of having to block out a certain piece of your day to go to school. Just doing that means that it's on your radar and it's harder to forget you're even in class.