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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: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Thursday October 22 2015, @03:29AM
I don't think that's entirely it. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that it's online and in a lot of those classes, you don't really get to interact with the other students very much. When I was in college we spent a ton of time talking with each other about the course content. In fact, we spent more time on that than actually getting lectured.
I don't think MOOCs are much worse than any other form of online learning. The only method I've found that actually works is one on one classes via skype. Most of the others just do not carry sufficient significance to finish or put much investment in.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday October 23 2015, @12:38AM
I think that would fall under the "impersonal learning doesn't work for you" section.
I hope the following doesn't come off as arrogant or ignorant, but based on personal experience:
Most of the learning still comes from the professor, the lecture, and/or the textbook. Other students are almost completely stupid. There are of course other smart students and I do learn from talking with them, but by far they are useless, especially in "lesser" schools. By far the biggest variable in learning quality, beside personal dedication, is the quality of the professor, the lecture, and/or the textbook. The professor is mostly for enriching the learning; a basic education, which is what MOOCs are aiming for anyway, can be achieved quite easily solely through class materials and practice problems.
Now, I don't have a representative sample handy to test how many people fall into the "impersonal learning doesn't work for you" category, but broadly assuming that it falls along introvert/extrovert lines, it would be about 50%.
I could also say that if you need to talk to other people to learn, you are simply using social interaction as an external motivator, you weak-willed pussy, but that would be dangerously close to a No True Scotsman fallacy.
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