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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the better-than-paying-for-it dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @02:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @02:45AM (#253057)

    What may be a better idea is to emphasize and retool MOOCS as industry certifications rather than classes. Maybe raise the stakes a little, maybe jack up the costs, whatever -- but I'm sure none of you will like that idea.

    You can count me as one of those who don't like that idea. My own experience: I have listened to the lectures of a couple of college level humanities type courses. One was taught for credit at Harvard and the other at Yale. Note that I didn't receive any credit for these courses but there were students enrolled in these courses for college credit. I just listened to the lectures, nothing else. No homework, no papers written. In fact, the professor almost certainly didn't know I was tuning in to watch, although since the content is posted out there on the intertubes for free they certainly know that people like me are accessing the content. And it's all free! I gather that the Ethanol-fueled One sees me as an "unmotivated" slacker. While I have no objection to offering the option of certification to those who want to demonstrate proficiency for professional purposes, I would object to making this mandatory for all on-line course materials. In fact, some of these on-line courses do just that. You pay a registration fee and take a proctored exam at an agreed upon time and local testing site; if you pass the test you get a certificate. But who are you to say that I am an "unmotivated" slacker just because I don't want to take the test? Shouldn't you rather applaud those of us who, instead of watching reruns on TV, tune in to a college level course to better ourselves by becoming (better) educated? Why would you want to discourage people from bettering themselves by raising artificial barriers such as higher prices for participation? Because they might "do less well"? What is the harm in letting the individual student decide what level of commitment they are comfortable with?