| Excellent take down. I'd also like to add that Mr. Selingo's paragraph here is so disingenuous that it can not be considered anything but a blatant lie: > A second problem is that when MOOCs replace traditional courses, an extremely high number of students fail. A well-publicized experiment backed by Gov. Jerry Brown of California at San Jose State University flopped. In one of the MOOCs, just 25 percent of students passed; in another, only 50 percent passed, much lower rates than for the on-campus equivalents. The experiment in question involved a remedial algebra class offered to students at SJSU who had not only failed "elementary math placement tests", but who had previously paid for and taken a on campus "SJSU Plus math" course and failed it. These were not normal students, these were from among the 50% of entering high school graduate students who were incapable of meeting basic requirements. They paid $150 to take the remedial class, much less than normal tuition at SJSU. When you fail the remedial class at SJSU, you are kicked out of the university and made to go back to community college and reapply to SJSU later. These students were given a chance at a second chance - to try their hand at an online class. The results[1] were that the SJSU on campus college algebra class has a 64.7% pass rate. The Summer 2013 pilot of the on line version had a 72.6% pass rate. That is a higher rate. For the remedial math class called Entry Level Math, the on campus pass rate has been 45.5%. For the on line summer 2013 pilot the pass rate was 29.8%. That is lower. However, in this case these students had already failed the on-campus one and were selected from that population. They were not the general population of students. The class was not replacing an on campus class since these students did not have the option of taking remedial class a second time, their only option was to leave the university and go to community college. When offering the same class to the general population of students, and not students that have failed remedial classes already, results are always better. The numbers for college algebra are above and represent a tremendous tuition savings. For SJSU's Circuits and Electronics class, 40% of on campus students got C or lower. For the online version of the same class, offered for SJSU credit through the EdX platform, only 9% got a C or lower. [2] In reporting these results, Mr. Selingo states that "when MOOCs replace traditional courses, an extremely high number of students fail". This claim is false. 1. http://blogs.sjsu.edu/today/2013/sjsu-plus-fall-2013-update-... 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/technology/california-to-g... |
The barrier to entry to MOOCs is very low (submit your email address, for example), whilst the barrier to entry to traditional courses is high (pay large amounts of money and often move home too).
Many people will, I imagine, sign up for MOOCs but fail early, within the first couple of weeks. There's a similar thing in multi-year university courses I think, some will fail their first year, those that make it through that will have a far higher rate of success.
The lower risk/barrier to entry is part of the reason to offer MOOCs IMO, you're enabling many people to try tertiary education for whom the risk-reward analysis is simply too adverse otherwise.
Surely provided MOOCs enable more people to acquire a given educational level they are working, whether that is cost effective or not I guess is the question to ask then.