[mlyang]

The thinking about MOOCs and their success metrics is flawed. We wouldn't measure the success of Wikipedia by the percentage of people who've read an entire Wiki article top to bottom for a particular topic they've searched for, why would we expect the same for MOOC courses? The reality is that it's just a great social good that these courses are available online and accessible to the select few who should choose to fully utilize them.

Everyone's too fixated on the completion rates for these courses. The reality is that the people who are checking out these courses are doing it mostly out of intellectual curiosity at this point, so they have no reason to finish certificates, or finish courses, or watch lectures that they're not interested in. These people have no incentive other than to pick and choose, and to idealistically expect that people will put themselves through the downsides of education (HW, exams, watching the boring lectures when they can just pick the interesting lectures) is unrealistic, and certainly not an indication that "MOOCs have failed."

[sown]

I think what changed Thrun's mind was the less than successful SJSU experiment: http://www.npr.org/2013/12/31/258420151/the-online-education...

[mhurron]

I'd love to finish that math course if I could log back in.

[saraid216]

It's more layered than that.

If people merely wanted to get the information out there, and make it possible to self-educate, then they would develop... well... wikis. Websites. YouTube videos explaining concepts. And that'd be it: they'd judge their success on outreach, on page views and maybe comments and emails. You'd have Khan Academy, full stop.

But that's not actually all they want. They want to know that their students understood. And to do that, they need to have the student prove their understanding as feedback. That's what completion rate really means. It is the metric that professors and teachers are accustomed to measuring themselves by. They've been trained to recognize the quality of their work based on the pass/fail rate of their class.

[my_username_is_]

It would be very interesting to see what types of things people go on to do with the knowledge that they've gained from MOOC's. The value created based on knowledge that otherwise wouldn't be accessible would be a very interesting metric to try and measure