Harvard and MIT make a compelling case for MOOCs

By Derrick Harris. Summary: A new study of data from massive open online courses offered by Harvard and MIT professors paints a different — and welcome — picture of the state of online education. Completition rates might be low, the authors argue, but that’s a misleading stat.
Harvard and MIT have released the draft of a working paper that makes a strong case for the potential benefits of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, despite low completion rates. The paper is rich on data about their respective HarvardX and MITx courses (although they plan to release significantly more data and analysis soon) and focuses on what I think has always been a faulty focal point of many MOOC criticisms. In a free, online environment, completion rates are vastly overrated. More...