Ashleyyfariass's List: The Downfall of MOOCS

• a large number of students already had previous programming experience and were only taking the course to “clean up” their foundations
• Abdussalam, who has taken a few MOOCs in her own time, says she probably wouldn’t have majored in computer science if she had only taken the online version of the CPSC 110 course
• “I think that these free courses are valuable for me personally as a resource, to help my education in university, but I wouldn’t view them as something that can replace that.”

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• For instance, roughly 14 percent of those who enrolled in Thrun's 2011 AI course passed the class. And that figure is quite a bit higher than the average completion rate for MOOCs, which according to graduate student Katy Jordan's research at Open University hovers at around 7.6 percent
• Although tens of thousands of students register for MOOCs, relatively few actually complete the courses
• More than 150,000 people signed up for it, but only 7,157--a measly five percent--completed the class
• But it's clear that this teaching format (on- or off-line) doesn't really work for many academic disciplines or for many types of college courses, particularly for students more accustomed to active classrooms, hands-on experimentation, and student-professor discussions.

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• only about half of those who registered for a course ever viewed a lecture, and only about 4 percent completed the courses.
• last month found that about 80 percent of those taking the university’s MOOCs had already earned a degree of some kind.
• Mr. Thrun, who had been unhappy with the low completion rates in free MOOCs, hoped to increase them by hiring online mentors to help students stick with the classes.
• Despite access to the Udacity mentors, the online students last spring — including many from a charter high school in Oakland — did worse than those who took the classes on campus
• But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed

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• local professors can offer their students the kind of personalized education that no massive course ever can.
• The average drop-out rates for existing MOOCs is about 90 percent, so while Coursera may offer access to higher education anywhere in the world where potential students can get the Internet, it offers no guarantee that anybody will actually learn anything.

• the ability to read, think about, and intelligently respond (both orally and in writing) to the literature of any field of study. Thus, implementation of MOOCs for university credit is bad because it is bad for our students.  
• (MOOC): a fully automated machine-run course with no face-to-face instruction or human contact that is open to everyone.
• K–12 education: seeing knowledge merely in terms of packets of information that can be imparted to students and then measured by standardized tests.
• “teaching to the test.”
• As a result, many of the college freshmen I encounter have never written a single paper of any sort in high school

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• MOOCs may offer discussion groups, but that is nothing like having a back-and-forth conversation in real time, they say.
• "For motivated learners, certainly MOOCs work very well," Schroeder says. But "for those learners who need close attention and support it can be much more difficult for them to progress through those courses."