Pay No Attention to Supposedly Low MOOC Completion Rates

By Kevin Carey. The recent New York Times coverage of a University of Pennsylvania study of 16 Coursera courses has helped solidify the new conventional wisdom about MOOCs: They have terrible completion rates. The Times reports that “only about 4 percent completed the courses,” which jibes with the Penn press release, titled “PENN GSE STUDY SHOWS MOOCS HAVE RELATIVELY FEW ACTIVE USERS, WITH ONLY A FEW PERSISTING TO COURSE END” and accompanying slide deck, which says, under “Emerging Conclusions,” that “Few ‘persist’ to course end.” 
This way of thinking about MOOCs is misleading. It mostly reflects how the traditional college mindset continues to dominate and limit the public understanding of what higher education can and should mean. More...